Videri - User contributions [en]

Media Studies

2012-06-22T22:37:54Z

KevinBaker: /* Reading Lists */

==Reading Lists==
* [[Communication, Technology, and Modernity - Cummings]]

==Sample Course Syllabuses==

* [[Media Studies 101 - Shlossberg]]
* [[Approaches to Media Studies]]
* [[Media History - Shlossberg]]
* [[Media Anthropology - Shlossberg]]
* [[Media Effects and Public Opinion - Shlossberg]]
* [[New Media and the Global Economy - Lime]]

==Book Summaries==
* Blondheim, [[News over the Wires|News over the Wires: The Telegraph and the Flow of Public Information in America]], 1844-1897, 1994
* Bagdikian, [[The Media Monopoly|The Media Monopoly: Updated Edition]], 2004.
* Brinkley, [[Voices of Protest|Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin and the Great Depression]], 1983
* Harvey, [[The Condition of Postmodernity|The Condition of Postmodernity]], 1990
* Jameson, [[Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism|Postmodernism or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism]], 1984
* Jhally and Livant, [[Watching as Working|“Watching as Working: The Valorization of Audience Consciousness”]], 1986
* Kern, [[The Culture of Time and Space]], 1983
* Mimura, [[Ghostlife of the Third Cinema|Ghostlife of the Third Cinema: Asian American Film and Video]], 2009
* O'Mara, [[Cities of Knowledge|Cities of Knowledge: Cold War Science and the Search for the Next Silicon Valley]], 2005
* Raley, [[Tactical Media]], 2009
* Sassen, [[The Global City]], 1991
* Silber, [[The Process of Financial Innovation|"The Process of Financial Innovation]]", 1983
* Wells, [[Certificates and Computers|"Certificates and Computers: The Remaking of Wall Street, 1967 to 1971]]", 2000

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2012-06-22T22:25:50Z

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The Global Cold War

2012-06-21T23:57:17Z

KevinBaker: Created page with "For over two decades, the turn toward transnational historical perspectives which seek to extend histories beyond nation-state conceptions, have led historians to reassess previo..."

For over two decades, the turn toward transnational historical perspectives which seek to extend histories beyond nation-state conceptions, have led historians to reassess previous movements, events, and peoples. In this light, Odd Arne Westad’s The Global Cold War: Interventions and the Making of Our Times examines the Cold War and its actors from numerous vantage points including those of Third World powers negotiating the complex terrain of diplomacy. More than anything, Westad emphasizes the importance of third world interventions by prominent Cold War powers ( the US, the USSR, China, and Cuba)in determining the future of many developing nations, illustrating the tensions and interplay between communist states. The Global Cold War traces the history of post WWII era interventions from their beginnings in the late 1940s through the Reagan presidency. In terms of breath, Arne traverses Africa, Europe, and much of Asia describing the numerous actors in each intervention.

One of Arne’s key contributions results from new archival sources. This ability to now map the thought of previously shrouded governments enables Arne to more completely explain the rational and logic behind Soviet actions. As well, he clearly illustrates that though a closed police state and with the exception of Stalinist rule, debate and disagreement within leadership circles around foreign policy mattered in regard to decision making just as Congressional debate does in the U.S. This is not to equate one with the other but rather to acknowledge that Soviet leaders felt political pressure and had to address their own nexus of power centers which in turn affected decisions. Fundamentally, both the US and USSR committed similar errors in its relations with developing nations. Each exuded an arrogance that diminished the political knowledge of the local leaders while applying US/USSR universal templates of development regardless of conditions. (with that noted, both US and USSR officials did find “nativist” movements in the Middle East of the 1950s-60s problematic for obvious reasons page 126-7) Additionally, each nation’s vision of itself suffered from romanticized imaginings of their own national histories that obscured more complex realities that might have served of importance when exporting one’s government.

Though Arne later suggests that the equality between the US and USSR never was truly equal (the US existed as more powerful in nearly every category), each shared a vision of pushing beyond national boundaries, brining modernity. However, their conceptions of modernity differed:

“While US and Soviet ideologies had much in common in terms of background and project, what separated them were their distinctive definitions of modernity meant. While most Americans celebrated the market, the Soviet elites denied it. Even while realizing that the market was the mechanism on which most of the expansion of Europe had been based, Lenin’s followers believed that it was in the process of being superseded by class-based collective action in favor of equality and justice. Modernity came in two stats: a capitalist form and a communal form, reflection two revolutions – that of capital and productivity, and that of democratization and the social advancement of the underprivileged. Communism was the higher stage of modernity, and it had been given to Russian workers to lead the way toward it.”

The tensions within the emerging communist world during the Cold War find clear expression in the context of third world interventions. Like Suri and others, Westad illustrates the lack of unity between Chinese and Russian governments along with the disgruntled nature of Cuba toward its Soviet allies. Castro believed the USSR too passive and compliant in the face of US hegemony. He constantly lobbied for more aid to third world movements while sending thousands of Cuban soldiers, technicians, teachers, and doctors abroad to help secure revolution in Angola and other developing nations. Also like Suri, Westad acknowledges the interest both the US and USSR had using détente to appease domestic audiences and international communities while each pursued various geopolitical goals in the burgeoning third world. Impressively, Westad also manages to trace the lines of intervention by both US and Soviet leaders individually, thus along with the interactions between fellow communist leaders like Castro and Mao, one grasps a more complex but complete vision of political forces fueling third world engagement. Moreover, the ebb and flow of each US/USSR (US is up after Guatamala and Iran – down after Bay of Pigs and Vietnam – up after Grenada and the Reaganite shift to internationalization of markets and the like whereas the USSR ignorant of 3rd world until 1955, successful in third world after American failures alienate Africans and Asians then down, way down after the Afghan War) success and failures provide testament to the fickle nature of intervention itself, even when it succeeds in the short term it may fail in the long term (Iran) with devastating consequences. The bipolar nature of diplomacy in the period meant that if anti-communism succeeded initially, its failures (“By around 1970 the United States had done much to create the Third World as an entity both in a positive and negative sense. Through its policies of confronting revolution, Washington had helped form blocks of resistance and a very basic form of Third World solidarity. Ironically, its interventionist policies had also contributed to radicalizing many Third World regimes, including some that were distinctly uncomfortable with any association with the Soviet Union …. The apparent success of socialist regimes – the availability of an alternative to capitalism and an alliance with America – also played a key role in radicalizing many Third World regimes, parties, and movements” – 157) pushed leaders to consider Marxism and the USSR in later decades, only to disappoint those same developing nations. In this way, one might connect Westad with Suri, who argued that détente and other aspects of the Cold War locked into place peoples and nations. Cold War giants valued stability and control over instability and revolution (of course, Suri also couches much of his argument around nuclear weapons arguing that they altered foreign policy in broad and meaningful ways and that détente and arms control were for domestic purposes as much as foreign policy and that they maintained an unequal status quo especially for the nations that receive attention in Westad) even if in their favor. Westad’s account does dispute this somewhat as he clearly illustrates Soviet efforts to do just that.

Without a doubt, the Vietnam War served as a symbol of third world capabilities, inspiring other peoples in developing nations but also leftists and rights movements in Western Europe and America. This example serves the initial purpose of illustrating the transnational nature of identities in this period along with the pervasive influence of Vietnam on the US, USSR, China, and Cuba. Moreover, Westad asserts the transnational nature of ideas when noting that some “revolutionaries” adopted Marxism not at the feet of Russian or Chinese instructuors but rather Western European and American intellectual circles while abroad.

Another key aspect of The Global Cold War involves Reagan era financial shifts. As the rhetoric of market expanded, the US sought to institutionalize its economic systems via international institutions such as the Bretton Woods Conference, the IMF, the World Bank, and others. Though the UN had initially been meant to help propagate American hegemony by the 1970s, the US found hostility more often than influence at the international peace keeping organization. Financial and trade institutions codified loan agreements expectations all resting on free market ideals that few if any of its leaders (most notably the US) ever achieved in their early development. Undoubtedly, this emerged as a key factor in third world developments, ultimately symbolizing the declining fortunes of the USSR, “their aim was a complete reorientation of both institutions (IMF/World Bank) toward monetarism and market ideology, while as far as possible – using their credit resources to serve US security objectives. Their slogans were conditionality – meaning a domestic and international change oward market solutions as a precondition for assistance – and adjustment – meaning an end to government quotas, subsidies, and very often social spending in the recipient countires under the guidance of IMF experts.”

Finally, the rise of Islamism proved an anethma to both the US and USSR. Thought each played a role in the rise of Islamist movements (think Afghanistan and Pakistan), both powers viewed their growth warily. The USSR (took little comfort in Iran’s 1979 revolution despite its disavowal of US power. Like Suri’s work, Westad emphasizes the impact of failed efforts and shattered expectations on movements and peoples. The same disillusionment that drove protest in Suri’s Cold War study, viewed from a similar perspective spurs revolutionaries across the third world. Westad seems particularly concerned by the ignored status of third world peoples impacted by various intervnetions. The collapse of communism and end of the Cold War obscured the processes that came before it. New arguments suggesting that maybe the excesses of Vietnam helped lay the foundation for Soviet collapse ignores the devastation wrought by the war while incorrectly assessing its importance. Westad goes to greath lengths to illustrate that the USSR’s downfall revolved around its inability keep up with its superpower status, spending money on defense and missiles that its economies could not afford. In fact, the Soviet reforms of glasnost accelerated this process as the failures of third world interventions found public expression in the “new” Soviet Union. (though experts within the USSR had long questioned the efficacy of the policy.) Meanwhile, fellow communists had long since given up on the USSR as a leader in global communism.

The Second Gold Rush

2012-06-21T23:54:02Z

KevinBaker: Created page with "Marilyn S. Johnson’s 1993 work ''The Second Gold Rush: Oakland and the East Bay in WWII'' explores the “human dimension of the war experience” connecting it to the structur..."

Marilyn S. Johnson’s 1993 work ''The Second Gold Rush: Oakland and the East Bay in WWII'' explores the “human dimension of the war experience” connecting it to the structural dynamics of the East Bay area during America’s involvement in the Second World War. Paying close attention to the role of migrants Johnson “seeks to contribute to an understanding of internal migration in the twentieth century, evaluating its impact on migrants and non-migrants alike”(3). Historians have tended to argue that WWII either accelerated processes already in evidence prior to war or that WWII transformed cities in ways that no longer resembled their previous incarnation. Johnson acknowledges the validity of each but remarks that often it depends on the specifics of the locality in question, thus for Oakland and the East Bay, WWII stood as a more transformative process than in other urban regions. The value of a community study Johnson argues is that it “enables us to see these conflicts by exploring social relations in the family, neighborhood and city.” (5)

At the turn of the century, Oakland emerged as the more significant city in the Bay Area. Serving as a shipping and railroad transportation hub, not until the completion of the Bay and Golden Gate Bridges did San Francisco finally outpace its East Bay neighbor. The movement of defense industries to Oakland led to the arrival of migrants from the southwest, south and Midwest. However, the regional, class, and racial divisions between them prevented any immediate unity. Additionally, prewar residents, white and black, grew to resent newcomers blaming them for the less savory aspects of their expanding metropolitan regions. Migrants and blacks found themselves blamed for numerous ills from drunkenness to prostitution to juvenile delinquency. Moreover, war housing established under federal auspices but carried out and implemented by local housing authorities established a physical and psychological separation from “old timers” and the newly arrived. Blacks and women especially suffered the brunt of local fears. Black men and women found themselves excluded from the major unions, though some more progressive organizations attempted to be more inclusive, while struggling to find housing in a private market that actively discriminated against them (even war housing established racial quotas for residents). Overcrowding occurred in many places during the war but especially black homes as housing options rarely appeared. Unlike Eastern and Midwestern cities that often created segregated sections of the city to house blacks, this process did not occur in Western metropolises until during and after the war, as more and more African Americans moved West in search of labor. Where anti-Asian racism once dominated, the sudden influx of blacks resulted in whites shifting their racial hostilities.

Though unions established themselves, they often competed with the corporate welfare of the time. Migrants from the South and Southwest viewed unions suspiciously while attempts by corporate fathers such as Kaiser’s health plan won over many who soon considered their employers to be of greater value than the unions. With that said unions proved important briefly after 1945 as they played a key role in electoral victories in Oakland (1947) behind the OVL (Oakland Voters League – an interracial coalition that drew veterans, blacks, progressives, and unions in an alliance to push back against the conservative Knowland machine which like many West coast metropolises favored the interests of business, real estate, and developers). Attempts to alievate the housing shortage resulted in “migrant ghettos” that, as noted before, physically and psychologically separated migrants from each other and native residents. Ultimately, these housing patterns though allegedly temporary, laid the foundation for post war residential development over which racial tensions played a significant role. Slum clearance and urban redevelopment enjoyed support by both liberal and conservative leaders but for different reasons, “Liberals saw it as an opportunity to rehouse needy veterans and war migrants; conservatives embraced it as a means of removing undesirables and returning housing project lands to private development.” (238) [see ''The New York Approach'']. Though liberal forces promoted public housing, by 1951 anti-communist rhetoric, racial anti-pithy, and internal divisions within the liberal coalition combined to return conservative leadership to local government. As well, as in eastern, Midwestern, and post war southwestern cities [see ''Logan Fighting Urban Sprawl''], individuals or organizations questioning redevelopment and slum clearance found themselves portrayed as obstructionists or worse. Always opposed to public housing since it removed private lands from development, conservative leaders and others convinced voters to pass Prop 10 which made the construction of new public housing eminently more difficult (it required levels of approval that were unlikely). Moreover, numerous East Bay municipalities removed war housing for new developments, “By the mid fifties, Berkeley, Oakland, and Richmond had disposed of most of their temporary war housing. The removal of public housing struck minority tenants the hardest.” (231) Though meant to drive migrants and blacks away, it failed to do so in many cases. The pattern of racial succession that followed often depended on public housing. Many blacks lacking options in the private market appealed to officials for a removal of racial quotas that had limited black residency, however, this resulted in the creation of completely black public housing. “Blight” and similar terms were harnessed to justify slum clearance and renewal. Race had become the determining factor, though working class white areas also found themselves similarly labeled. The experience of African Americans in the immediate post war years served to lay the foundation for 1960-1970s resistance that erupted in Oakland and surrounding environs.

Since a cohesive working class culture failed to develop in the East Bay, the family served as the primary social and organizational unit. Outside of family some level of regional and racial solidarity existed. Notably, Johnson explores the role of women noting that their participation in industry. Women enjoyed employment opportunities previously not open to them but also experienced limits. Management positions rarely if ever went to women, while even female war workers found themselves the subject of suspicion regarding promiscuity and child care. Women and blacks suffered from accusations ranging from drunkenness to prostitution in public spaces. The proliferation of commercial amusements only magnified this process. Divorce rates rose as did incidents of domestic violence. Moreover, non-essential workers found themselves disparaged, while they themselves often resented the favoritism accorded war industry workers. As in San Diego, single women in public spaces, especially commercial amusements, could find themselves locked up and quarantined if suspected of prostitution or venereal disease. Rapes and sexual assaults often refocused blame on women themselves, accusing them of promiscuity.

In terms of politics, unlike other post war cities, Oakland’s working classes emerged in the immediate aftermath to challenge the machine. As previously mentioned, this proved to be a momentary victory before conservative forces regrouped and assumed power again. Ultimately, this process at least enabled minorities and labor to establish the organizational structures that would benefit in the 1960s and 70s, “By the 1970s, machine rule was coming to an end, pushed out by a new generation of progressives seeking to fulfill the lost hopes of the wartime coalitions.” (238) (this included shifts to district elections, mass transit improvement, fair employment legislation, rent control, education/social services)

Johnson points out that preoccupation with the war as watershed has blinded historians to more important questions regarding the impact of World War II …. Historians of the homefront would do better to identify exactly where and how specific changes occurred and how the war reshaped existing social and economic trends.” The pace of such events also matters such that “understanding that rapid unplanned social change produces different results that the same phenomenon spread over several decades.” (236)

(Johnson also notes cultural contributions that brought blues, country music, evangelical religion, southern food, and the establishment of working class suburbs as well)

Twentieth Century United States

2012-06-21T23:50:04Z

KevinBaker:

* Luis Alvarez. [[The Power of the Zoot|The Power of the Zoot: Youth Culture and Resistance during World War II]] (2008).
* Karen Anderson. [[Wartime Women|Wartime Women: Sex Roles, Family Relations, and the Status of Women During World War II]] (1981).
* Eric Avila. [[Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight|Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight: Fear and Fantasy in Suburban Los Angeles]] (2004).
* Beth Bailey. [[America’s Army|America’s Army: Making the All-Volunteer Force]] (2009).
* Beth Bailey & David Farber. [[The First Strange Place|The First Strange Place: The Alchemy of Race and Sex in World War II Hawaii]] (1992).
* Beth L. Bailey. [[From Front Porch to Back Seat|From Front Porch to Back Seat: Courtship in Twentieth-Century America]] (1989).
* Amy Bridges. [[Morning Glories]] (1999).
* Laura Briggs. [[Reproducing Empire|Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex, Science, and U.S. Imperialism in Puerto Rico]] (2002).
* Alan Brinkley. [[Voices of Protest|Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin, & the Great Depression]] (1983).
* Charlotte Brooks. [[Alien Neighbors, Foreign Friends|Alien Neighbors, Foreign Friends: Asian Americans, Housing, and the Transformation of Urban California]] (2009).
* Lizabeth Cohen. [[A Consumers’ Republic|A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America]] (2003).
* Lizabeth Cohen. [[Making a New Deal|Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939]] (2008).
* Nancy F. Cott. [[Public Vows|Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation]] (2002).
* Mike Davis. [[City of Quartz|City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles]] (2006).
* Mike Davis & Michael Sprinker. [[Magical Urbanism|Magical Urbanism: Latinos Reinvent the US Big City]] (2001).
* Michael J. Dear. [[The Postmodern Urban Condition]] (2001).
* Steven Erie. [[Globalizing L.A.|Globalizing L.A.: Trade, Infrastructure, and Regional Development]] (2004).
* Steven P. Erie. [[Beyond Chinatown|Beyond Chinatown: The Metropolitan Water District, Growth, and the Environment in Southern California]] (2006).
* Elizabeth Ewen. [[Immigrant Women in the Land of Dollars]] (1985).
* Barbara Ferman. [[Challenging the Growth Machine|Challenging the Growth Machine: Neighborhood Politics in Chicago and Pittsburgh]] (1996).
* John M. Findlay. [[Magic Lands|Magic Lands: Western Cityscapes and American Culture After 1940]] (1993).
* Steven Gregory. [[Black Corona|Black Corona: Race and the Politics of Place in an Urban Community]] (1999).
* Jason Hackworth. [[The Neoliberal City|The Neoliberal City: Governance, Ideology, and Development in American Urbanism]] (2006).
* William Ivy Hair. [[Carnival of Fury|Carnival of Fury: Robert Charles and the New Orleans Race Riot of 1900]] (2008).
* Chester W. Hartman. [[Yerba Buena|Yerba Buena: land grab and community resistance in San Francisco,]] (1974).
* Georgina Hickey. [[Hope and Danger in the New South City|Hope and Danger in the New South City: Working-Class Women and Urban Development in Atlanta, 1890-1940]] (2005).
* Richard Hofstadter. [[The American Political Tradition|The American Political Tradition: And the Men Who Made it]] (1989).
* Daniel Horowitz. [[Betty Friedan and the Making of “The Feminine Mystique”|Betty Friedan and the Making of “The Feminine Mystique”: The American Left, the Cold War, and Modern Feminism]] (2000).
* Jonathan Hughes (Editor)& Simon Sadler (Editor).[[Non-Plan|Non-Plan: Essays on Freedom, Participation and Change in Modern Architecture and Urbanism]] (2000).
* Daniel Hurewitz. [[Bohemian Los Angeles|Bohemian Los Angeles: and the Making of Modern Politics]] (2007).
* Marilynn S. Johnson. [[The Second Gold Rush|The Second Gold Rush: Oakland and the East Bay in World War II]] (1994).
* Kevin M. Kruse. [[White Flight|White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism]] (2007).
* Matthew D. Lassiter. [[The Silent Majority|The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South]] (2007).
* William R. Leach. [[Land of Desire|Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture]] (1994).
* Michael F. Logan. [[Fighting Sprawl and City Hall|Fighting Sprawl and City Hall: Resistance to Urban Growth in the Southwest]] (1995).
* Roger W. Lotchin. [[Fortress California, 1910-1961|Fortress California, 1910-1961: From Warfare to Welfare]] (2002).
* Lisa Lowe. [[Immigrant Acts|Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics]] (1996).
* Robert S. Lynd & Helen Merrell Lynd. [[Middletown|Middletown: A Study in Modern American Culture]] (1959).
* Nancy MacLean. [[Freedom Is Not Enough|Freedom Is Not Enough: The Opening of the American Workplace]] (2008).
* Douglas Massey & Nancy Denton. [[American Apartheid|American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass]] (1993).
* Lisa McGirr. [[Suburban Warriors|Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right]] (2002).
* James Miller. [[Flowers in the Dustbin|Flowers in the Dustbin: The Rise of Rock and Roll, 1947-1977]] (2000).
* Glen M. Mimura. [[Ghostlife of the Third Cinema|Ghostlife of Third Cinema: Asian American Film and Video]] (2009).
* John Hull Mollenkopf. [[The Contested City]] (1983).
* Armando Navarro. [[The Cristal Experiment|The Cristal Experiment: A Chicano Struggle for Community Control]] (1998).
* Becky M. Nicolaides. [[My Blue Heaven|My Blue Heaven: Life and Politics in the Working-Class Suburbs of Los Angeles, 1920-1965]] (2002).
* Margaret Pugh O’Mara. [[Cities of Knowledge|Cities of Knowledge: Cold War Science and the Search for the Next Silicon Valley]] (2004).
* Gilbert Osofsky. [[Harlem|Harlem: The Making of a Ghetto : Negro New York, 1890-1930]] (1996).
* Rebecca Jo Plant. [[Mom|Mom: The Transformation of Motherhood in Modern America]] (2012).
* Daniel T. Rodgers. [[Contested Truths|Contested Truths: Keywords in American Politics Since Independence]] (1998).
* Adam Rome. [[The Bulldozer in the Countryside|The Bulldozer in the Countryside: Suburban Sprawl and the Rise of American Environmentalism]] (2001).
* Richard Ronald. [[The Ideology of Home Ownership|The Ideology of Home Ownership: Homeowner Societies and the Role of Housing]] (2008).
* Peter Henry Rossi & Robert A. Dentler. [[The Politics of Urban Renewal|The Politics of Urban Renewal: The Chicago Findings]] (1981).
* Roger Sanjek. [[The Future of Us All|The Future of Us All: Race and Neighborhood Politics in New York City]] (1998).
* Bruce Schulman & Bruce J. Schulman. [[The Seventies|The Seventies: The Great Shift In American Culture, Society, And Politics]] (2002).
* Joel Schwartz. [[The New York Approach|The New York Approach: Robert Moses, Urban Liberals, and Redevelopment of the Inner City]] (1993).
* Rickie Solinger. [[Beggars and Choosers|Beggars and Choosers: How the Politics of Choice Shapes Adoption, Abortion, and Welfare in the United States]] (2002).
* Allan H. Spear. [[Black Chicago|Black Chicago: The Making of a Negro Ghetto, 1890-1920]] (1969).
* Todd Swanstrom. [[The Crisis of Growth Politics|The Crisis of Growth Politics: Cleveland, Kucinich, and the Challenge of Urban Populism]] (1988).
* Ronald Takaki. [[Hiroshima|Hiroshima: Why America Dropped the Atomic Bomb]] (1996).
* Rhonda Y. Williams. [[The Politics of Public Housing|The Politics of Public Housing: Black Women’s Struggles Against Urban Inequality]] (2004).
* William Appleman Williams. [[The Tragedy of American Diplomacy]] (2009).
* Gwendolyn Wright. [[Building the Dream|Building the Dream: A Social History of Housing in America]] (1983).

Twentieth Century United States

2012-06-21T23:49:23Z

KevinBaker:

* Luis Alvarez. [[The Power of the Zoot|The Power of the Zoot: Youth Culture and Resistance during World War II]] (2008).
* Karen Anderson. [[Wartime Women|Wartime Women: Sex Roles, Family Relations, and the Status of Women During World War II]] (1981).
* Eric Avila. [[Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight|Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight: Fear and Fantasy in Suburban Los Angeles]] (2004).
* Beth Bailey. [[America’s Army|America’s Army: Making the All-Volunteer Force]] (2009).
* Beth Bailey & David Farber. [[The First Strange Place|The First Strange Place: The Alchemy of Race and Sex in World War II Hawaii]] (1992).
* Beth L. Bailey. [[From Front Porch to Back Seat|From Front Porch to Back Seat: Courtship in Twentieth-Century America]] (1989).
* Amy Bridges. [[Morning Glories]] (1999).
* Laura Briggs. [[Reproducing Empire|Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex, Science, and U.S. Imperialism in Puerto Rico]] (2002).
* Alan Brinkley. [[Voices of Protest|Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin, & the Great Depression]] (1983).
* Charlotte Brooks. [[Alien Neighbors, Foreign Friends|Alien Neighbors, Foreign Friends: Asian Americans, Housing, and the Transformation of Urban California]] (2009).
* Lizabeth Cohen. [[A Consumers’ Republic|A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America]] (2003).
* Lizabeth Cohen. [[Making a New Deal|Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939]] (2008).
* Nancy F. Cott. [[Public Vows|Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation]] (2002).
* Mike Davis. [[City of Quartz|City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles]] (2006).
* Mike Davis & Michael Sprinker. [[Magical Urbanism|Magical Urbanism: Latinos Reinvent the US Big City]] (2001).
* Michael J. Dear. [[The Postmodern Urban Condition]] (2001).
* Steven Erie. [[Globalizing L.A.|Globalizing L.A.: Trade, Infrastructure, and Regional Development]] (2004).
* Steven P. Erie. [[Beyond Chinatown|Beyond Chinatown: The Metropolitan Water District, Growth, and the Environment in Southern California]] (2006).
* Elizabeth Ewen. [[Immigrant Women in the Land of Dollars]] (1985).
* Barbara Ferman. [[Challenging the Growth Machine|Challenging the Growth Machine: Neighborhood Politics in Chicago and Pittsburgh]] (1996).
* John M. Findlay. [[Magic Lands|Magic Lands: Western Cityscapes and American Culture After 1940]] (1993).
* Steven Gregory. [[Black Corona|Black Corona: Race and the Politics of Place in an Urban Community]] (1999).
* Jason Hackworth. [[The Neoliberal City|The Neoliberal City: Governance, Ideology, and Development in American Urbanism]] (2006).
* William Ivy Hair. [[Carnival of Fury|Carnival of Fury: Robert Charles and the New Orleans Race Riot of 1900]] (2008).
* Chester W. Hartman. [[Yerba Buena|Yerba Buena: land grab and community resistance in San Francisco,]] (1974).
* Georgina Hickey. [[Hope and Danger in the New South City|Hope and Danger in the New South City: Working-Class Women and Urban Development in Atlanta, 1890-1940]] (2005).
* Richard Hofstadter. [[The American Political Tradition|The American Political Tradition: And the Men Who Made it]] (1989).
* Daniel Horowitz. [[Betty Friedan and the Making of “The Feminine Mystique”|Betty Friedan and the Making of “The Feminine Mystique”: The American Left, the Cold War, and Modern Feminism]] (2000).
* Jonathan Hughes (Editor)& Simon Sadler (Editor).[[Non-Plan|Non-Plan: Essays on Freedom, Participation and Change in Modern Architecture and Urbanism]] (2000).
* Daniel Hurewitz. [[Bohemian Los Angeles|Bohemian Los Angeles: and the Making of Modern Politics]] (2007).
* Marilynn S. Johnson. [[The Second Gold Rush|The Second Gold Rush: Oakland and the East Bay in World War II]] (1994).
* Kevin M. Kruse. [[White Flight|White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism]] (2007).
* Matthew D. Lassiter. [[The Silent Majority|The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South]] (2007).
* William R. Leach. [[Land of Desire|Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture]] (1994).
* Michael F. Logan. [[Fighting Sprawl and City Hall|Fighting Sprawl and City Hall: Resistance to Urban Growth in the Southwest]] (1995).
* Roger W. Lotchin. [[Fortress California, 1910-1961|Fortress California, 1910-1961: FROM WARFARE TO WELFARE]] (2002).
* Lisa Lowe. [[Immigrant Acts|Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics]] (1996).
* Robert S. Lynd & Helen Merrell Lynd. [[Middletown|Middletown: A Study in Modern American Culture]] (1959).
* Nancy MacLean. [[Freedom Is Not Enough|Freedom Is Not Enough: The Opening of the American Workplace]] (2008).
* Douglas Massey & Nancy Denton. [[American Apartheid|American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass]] (1993).
* Lisa McGirr. [[Suburban Warriors|Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right]] (2002).
* James Miller. [[Flowers in the Dustbin|Flowers in the Dustbin: The Rise of Rock and Roll, 1947-1977]] (2000).
* Glen M. Mimura. [[Ghostlife of the Third Cinema|Ghostlife of Third Cinema: Asian American Film and Video]] (2009).
* John Hull Mollenkopf. [[The Contested City]] (1983).
* Armando Navarro. [[The Cristal Experiment|The Cristal Experiment: A Chicano Struggle for Community Control]] (1998).
* Becky M. Nicolaides. [[My Blue Heaven|My Blue Heaven: Life and Politics in the Working-Class Suburbs of Los Angeles, 1920-1965]] (2002).
* Margaret Pugh O’Mara. [[Cities of Knowledge|Cities of Knowledge: Cold War Science and the Search for the Next Silicon Valley]] (2004).
* Gilbert Osofsky. [[Harlem|Harlem: The Making of a Ghetto : Negro New York, 1890-1930]] (1996).
* Rebecca Jo Plant. [[Mom|Mom: The Transformation of Motherhood in Modern America]] (2012).
* Daniel T. Rodgers. [[Contested Truths|Contested Truths: Keywords in American Politics Since Independence]] (1998).
* Adam Rome. [[The Bulldozer in the Countryside|The Bulldozer in the Countryside: Suburban Sprawl and the Rise of American Environmentalism]] (2001).
* Richard Ronald. [[The Ideology of Home Ownership|The Ideology of Home Ownership: Homeowner Societies and the Role of Housing]] (2008).
* Peter Henry Rossi & Robert A. Dentler. [[The Politics of Urban Renewal|The Politics of Urban Renewal: The Chicago Findings]] (1981).
* Roger Sanjek. [[The Future of Us All|The Future of Us All: Race and Neighborhood Politics in New York City]] (1998).
* Bruce Schulman & Bruce J. Schulman. [[The Seventies|The Seventies: The Great Shift In American Culture, Society, And Politics]] (2002).
* Joel Schwartz. [[The New York Approach|The New York Approach: Robert Moses, Urban Liberals, and Redevelopment of the Inner City]] (1993).
* Rickie Solinger. [[Beggars and Choosers|Beggars and Choosers: How the Politics of Choice Shapes Adoption, Abortion, and Welfare in the United States]] (2002).
* Allan H. Spear. [[Black Chicago|Black Chicago: The Making of a Negro Ghetto, 1890-1920]] (1969).
* Todd Swanstrom. [[The Crisis of Growth Politics|The Crisis of Growth Politics: Cleveland, Kucinich, and the Challenge of Urban Populism]] (1988).
* Ronald Takaki. [[Hiroshima|Hiroshima: Why America Dropped the Atomic Bomb]] (1996).
* Rhonda Y. Williams. [[The Politics of Public Housing|The Politics of Public Housing: Black Women’s Struggles Against Urban Inequality]] (2004).
* William Appleman Williams. [[The Tragedy of American Diplomacy]] (2009).
* Gwendolyn Wright. [[Building the Dream|Building the Dream: A Social History of Housing in America]] (1983).

Twentieth Century United States

2012-06-21T23:48:49Z

KevinBaker:

* Luis Alvarez. [[The Power of the Zoot|The Power of the Zoot: Youth Culture and Resistance during World War II]] (2008).
* Karen Anderson. [[Wartime Women|Wartime Women: Sex Roles, Family Relations, and the Status of Women During World War II]] (1981).
* Eric Avila. [[Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight|Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight: Fear and Fantasy in Suburban Los Angeles]] (2004).
* Beth Bailey. [[America’s Army|America’s Army: Making the All-Volunteer Force]] (2009).
* Beth Bailey & David Farber. [[The First Strange Place|The First Strange Place: The Alchemy of Race and Sex in World War II Hawaii]] (1992).
* Beth L. Bailey. [[From Front Porch to Back Seat|From Front Porch to Back Seat: Courtship in Twentieth-Century America]] (1989).
* Amy Bridges. [[Morning Glories]] (1999).
* Laura Briggs. [[Reproducing Empire|Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex, Science, and U.S. Imperialism in Puerto Rico]] (2002).
* Alan Brinkley. [[Voices of Protest|Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin, & the Great Depression]] (1983).
* Charlotte Brooks. [[Alien Neighbors, Foreign Friends|Alien Neighbors, Foreign Friends: Asian Americans, Housing, and the Transformation of Urban California]] (2009).
* Lizabeth Cohen. [[A Consumers’ Republic|A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America]] (2003).
* Lizabeth Cohen. [[Making a New Deal|Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939]] (2008).
* Nancy F. Cott. [[Public Vows|Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation]] (2002).
* Mike Davis. [[City of Quartz|City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles]] (2006).
* Mike Davis & Michael Sprinker. [[Magical Urbanism|Magical Urbanism: Latinos Reinvent the US Big City]] (2001).
* Michael J. Dear. [[The Postmodern Urban Condition]] (2001).
* Steven Erie. [[Globalizing L.A.|Globalizing L.A.: Trade, Infrastructure, and Regional Development]] (2004).
* Steven P. Erie. [[Beyond Chinatown|Beyond Chinatown: The Metropolitan Water District, Growth, and the Environment in Southern California]] (2006).
* Elizabeth Ewen. [[Immigrant Women in the Land of Dollars]] (1985).
* Barbara Ferman. [[Challenging the Growth Machine|Challenging the Growth Machine: Neighborhood Politics in Chicago and Pittsburgh]] (1996).
* John M. Findlay. [[Magic Lands|Magic Lands: Western Cityscapes and American Culture After 1940]] (1993).
* Steven Gregory. [[Black Corona|Black Corona: Race and the Politics of Place in an Urban Community]] (1999).
* Jason Hackworth. [[The Neoliberal City|The Neoliberal City: Governance, Ideology, and Development in American Urbanism]] (2006).
* William Ivy Hair. [[Carnival of Fury|Carnival of Fury: Robert Charles and the New Orleans Race Riot of 1900]] (2008).
* Chester W. Hartman. [[Yerba Buena|Yerba Buena: land grab and community resistance in San Francisco,]] (1974).
* Georgina Hickey. [[Hope and Danger in the New South City|Hope and Danger in the New South City: Working-Class Women and Urban Development in Atlanta, 1890-1940]] (2005).
* Richard Hofstadter. [[The American Political Tradition|The American Political Tradition: And the Men Who Made it]] (1989).
* Daniel Horowitz. [[Betty Friedan and the Making of “The Feminine Mystique”|Betty Friedan and the Making of “The Feminine Mystique”: The American Left, the Cold War, and Modern Feminism]] (2000).
* Jonathan Hughes (Editor)& Simon Sadler (Editor).[[Non-Plan|Non-Plan: Essays on Freedom, Participation and Change in Modern Architecture and Urbanism]] (2000).
* Daniel Hurewitz. [[Bohemian Los Angeles|Bohemian Los Angeles: and the Making of Modern Politics]] (2007).
* Marilynn S. Johnson. [[The Second Gold Rush|The Second Gold Rush: Oakland and the East Bay in World War II]] (1994).
* Kevin M. Kruse. [[White Flight|White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism]] (2007).
* Matthew D. Lassiter. [[The Silent Majority|The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South]] (2007).
* William R. Leach. [[Land of Desire|Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture]] (1994).
* Michael F. Logan. [[Fighting Sprawl and City Hall|Fighting Sprawl and City Hall: Resistance to Urban Growth in the Southwest]] (1995).
* Roger W. Lotchin. [[Fortress California, 1910-1961|Fortress California, 1910-1961: FROM WARFARE TO WELFARE]] (2002).
* Lisa Lowe. [[Immigrant Acts|Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics]] (1996).
* Robert S. Lynd & Helen Merrell Lynd. [[Middletown|Middletown: A Study in Modern American Culture]] (1959).
* Nancy MacLean. [[Freedom Is Not Enough|Freedom Is Not Enough: The Opening of the American Workplace]] (2008).
* Douglas Massey & Nancy Denton. [[American Apartheid|American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass]] (1993).
* Lisa McGirr. [[Suburban Warriors|Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right]] (2002).
* James Miller. [[Flowers in the Dustbin|Flowers in the Dustbin: The Rise of Rock and Roll, 1947-1977]] (2000).
* Glen M. Mimura. [[Ghostlife of the Third Cinema|Ghostlife of Third Cinema: Asian American Film and Video]] (2009).
* John Hull Mollenkopf.|The Contested City]] (1983).
* Armando Navarro. [[The Cristal Experiment|The Cristal Experiment: A Chicano Struggle for Community Control]] (1998).
* Becky M. Nicolaides. [[My Blue Heaven|My Blue Heaven: Life and Politics in the Working-Class Suburbs of Los Angeles, 1920-1965]] (2002).
* Margaret Pugh O’Mara. [[Cities of Knowledge|Cities of Knowledge: Cold War Science and the Search for the Next Silicon Valley]] (2004).
* Gilbert Osofsky. [[Harlem|Harlem: The Making of a Ghetto : Negro New York, 1890-1930]] (1996).
* Rebecca Jo Plant. [[Mom|Mom: The Transformation of Motherhood in Modern America]] (2012).
* Daniel T. Rodgers. [[Contested Truths|Contested Truths: Keywords in American Politics Since Independence]] (1998).
* Adam Rome. [[The Bulldozer in the Countryside|The Bulldozer in the Countryside: Suburban Sprawl and the Rise of American Environmentalism]] (2001).
* Richard Ronald. [[The Ideology of Home Ownership|The Ideology of Home Ownership: Homeowner Societies and the Role of Housing]] (2008).
* Peter Henry Rossi & Robert A. Dentler. [[The Politics of Urban Renewal|The Politics of Urban Renewal: The Chicago Findings]] (1981).
* Roger Sanjek. [[The Future of Us All|The Future of Us All: Race and Neighborhood Politics in New York City]] (1998).
* Bruce Schulman & Bruce J. Schulman. [[The Seventies|The Seventies: The Great Shift In American Culture, Society, And Politics]] (2002).
* Joel Schwartz. [[The New York Approach|The New York Approach: Robert Moses, Urban Liberals, and Redevelopment of the Inner City]] (1993).
* Rickie Solinger. [[Beggars and Choosers|Beggars and Choosers: How the Politics of Choice Shapes Adoption, Abortion, and Welfare in the United States]] (2002).
* Allan H. Spear. [[Black Chicago|Black Chicago: The Making of a Negro Ghetto, 1890-1920]] (1969).
* Todd Swanstrom. [[The Crisis of Growth Politics|The Crisis of Growth Politics: Cleveland, Kucinich, and the Challenge of Urban Populism]] (1988).
* Ronald Takaki. [[Hiroshima|Hiroshima: Why America Dropped the Atomic Bomb]] (1996).
* Rhonda Y. Williams. [[The Politics of Public Housing|The Politics of Public Housing: Black Women’s Struggles Against Urban Inequality]] (2004).
* William Appleman Williams. [[The Tragedy of American Diplomacy]] (2009).
* Gwendolyn Wright. [[Building the Dream|Building the Dream: A Social History of Housing in America]] (1983).

Twentieth Century United States

2012-06-21T23:46:34Z

KevinBaker:

* Luis Alvarez. [[The Power of the Zoot|The Power of the Zoot: Youth Culture and Resistance during World War II]] (2008).
* Karen Anderson. [[Wartime Women|Wartime Women: Sex Roles, Family Relations, and the Status of Women During World War II]] (1981).
* Eric Avila. [[Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight|Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight: Fear and Fantasy in Suburban Los Angeles]] (2004).
* Beth Bailey. [[America’s Army|America’s Army: Making the All-Volunteer Force]] (2009).
* Beth Bailey & David Farber. [[The First Strange Place|The First Strange Place: The Alchemy of Race and Sex in World War II Hawaii]] (1992).
* Beth L. Bailey. [[From Front Porch to Back Seat|From Front Porch to Back Seat: Courtship in Twentieth-Century America]] (1989).
* Amy Bridges. [[Morning Glories]] (1999).
* Laura Briggs. [[Reproducing Empire|Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex, Science, and U.S. Imperialism in Puerto Rico]] (2002).
* Alan Brinkley. [[Voices of Protest|Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin, & the Great Depression]] (1983).
* Charlotte Brooks. [[Alien Neighbors, Foreign Friends|Alien Neighbors, Foreign Friends: Asian Americans, Housing, and the Transformation of Urban California]] (2009).
* Lizabeth Cohen. [[A Consumers’ Republic|A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America]] (2003).
* Lizabeth Cohen. [[Making a New Deal|Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939]] (2008).
* Nancy F. Cott. [[Public Vows|Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation]] (2002).
* Mike Davis. [[City of Quartz|City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles]] (2006).
* Mike Davis & Michael Sprinker. [[Magical Urbanism|Magical Urbanism: Latinos Reinvent the US Big City]] (2001).
* Michael J. Dear. [[The Postmodern Urban Condition]] (2001).
* Steven Erie. [[Globalizing L.A.|Globalizing L.A.: Trade, Infrastructure, and Regional Development]] (2004).
* Steven P. Erie. [[Beyond Chinatown|Beyond Chinatown: The Metropolitan Water District, Growth, and the Environment in Southern California]] (2006).
* Elizabeth Ewen. [[Immigrant Women in the Land of Dollars]] (1985).
* Barbara Ferman. [[Challenging the Growth Machine|Challenging the Growth Machine: Neighborhood Politics in Chicago and Pittsburgh]] (1996).
* John M. Findlay. [[Magic Lands|Magic Lands: Western Cityscapes and American Culture After 1940]] (1993).
* Steven Gregory. [[Black Corona|Black Corona: Race and the Politics of Place in an Urban Community]] (1999).
* Jason Hackworth. [[The Neoliberal City|The Neoliberal City: Governance, Ideology, and Development in American Urbanism]] (2006).
* William Ivy Hair. [[Carnival of Fury|Carnival of Fury: Robert Charles and the New Orleans Race Riot of 1900]] (2008).
* Chester W. Hartman. [[Yerba Buena|Yerba Buena: land grab and community resistance in San Francisco,]] (1974).
* Georgina Hickey. [[Hope and Danger in the New South City|Hope and Danger in the New South City: Working-Class Women and Urban Development in Atlanta, 1890-1940]] (2005).
* Richard Hofstadter. [[The American Political Tradition|The American Political Tradition: And the Men Who Made it]] (1989).
* Daniel Horowitz. [[Betty Friedan and the Making of “The Feminine Mystique”|Betty Friedan and the Making of “The Feminine Mystique”: The American Left, the Cold War, and Modern Feminism]] (2000).
* Jonathan Hughes (Editor)& Simon Sadler (Editor).[[Non-Plan|Non-Plan: Essays on Freedom, Participation and Change in Modern Architecture and Urbanism]] (2000).
* Daniel Hurewitz. [[Bohemian Los Angeles|Bohemian Los Angeles: and the Making of Modern Politics]] (2007).
* Marilynn S. Johnson. [[The Second Gold Rush|The Second Gold Rush: Oakland and the East Bay in World War II]] (1994).
* Kevin M. Kruse. [[White Flight|White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism]] (2007).
* Matthew D. Lassiter. [[The Silent Majority|The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South]] (2007).
* William R. Leach. [[Land of Desire|Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture]] (1994).
* Michael F. Logan. [[Fighting Sprawl and City Hall|Fighting Sprawl and City Hall: Resistance to Urban Growth in the Southwest]] (1995).
* Roger W. Lotchin. [[Fortress California, 1910-1961|Fortress California, 1910-1961: FROM WARFARE TO WELFARE]] (2002).
* Lisa Lowe. [[Immigrant Acts|Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics]] (1996).
* Robert S. Lynd & Helen Merrell Lynd. [[Middletown|Middletown: A Study in Modern American Culture]] (1959).
* Nancy MacLean. [[Freedom Is Not Enough|Freedom Is Not Enough: The Opening of the American Workplace]] (2008).
* Douglas Massey & Nancy Denton. [[American Apartheid|American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass]] (1993).
* Lisa McGirr. [[Suburban Warriors|Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right]] (2002).
* James Miller. [[Flowers in the Dustbin|Flowers in the Dustbin: The Rise of Rock and Roll, 1947-1977]] (2000).
* Glen M. Mimura. [[Ghostlife of Third Cinema|Ghostlife of Third Cinema: Asian American Film and Video]] (2009).
* John Hull Mollenkopf.|The Contested City]] (1983).
* Armando Navarro. [[The Cristal Experiment|The Cristal Experiment: A Chicano Struggle for Community Control]] (1998).
* Becky M. Nicolaides. [[My Blue Heaven|My Blue Heaven: Life and Politics in the Working-Class Suburbs of Los Angeles, 1920-1965]] (2002).
* Margaret Pugh O’Mara. [[Cities of Knowledge|Cities of Knowledge: Cold War Science and the Search for the Next Silicon Valley]] (2004).
* Gilbert Osofsky. [[Harlem|Harlem: The Making of a Ghetto : Negro New York, 1890-1930]] (1996).
* Rebecca Jo Plant. [[Mom|Mom: The Transformation of Motherhood in Modern America]] (2012).
* Daniel T. Rodgers. [[Contested Truths|Contested Truths: Keywords in American Politics Since Independence]] (1998).
* Adam Rome. [[The Bulldozer in the Countryside|The Bulldozer in the Countryside: Suburban Sprawl and the Rise of American Environmentalism]] (2001).
* Richard Ronald. [[The Ideology of Home Ownership|The Ideology of Home Ownership: Homeowner Societies and the Role of Housing]] (2008).
* Peter Henry Rossi & Robert A. Dentler. [[The Politics of Urban Renewal|The Politics of Urban Renewal: The Chicago Findings]] (1981).
* Roger Sanjek. [[The Future of Us All|The Future of Us All: Race and Neighborhood Politics in New York City]] (1998).
* Bruce Schulman & Bruce J. Schulman. [[The Seventies|The Seventies: The Great Shift In American Culture, Society, And Politics]] (2002).
* Joel Schwartz. [[The New York Approach|The New York Approach: Robert Moses, Urban Liberals, and Redevelopment of the Inner City]] (1993).
* Rickie Solinger. [[Beggars and Choosers|Beggars and Choosers: How the Politics of Choice Shapes Adoption, Abortion, and Welfare in the United States]] (2002).
* Allan H. Spear. [[Black Chicago|Black Chicago: The Making of a Negro Ghetto, 1890-1920]] (1969).
* Todd Swanstrom. [[The Crisis of Growth Politics|The Crisis of Growth Politics: Cleveland, Kucinich, and the Challenge of Urban Populism]] (1988).
* Ronald Takaki. [[Hiroshima|Hiroshima: Why America Dropped the Atomic Bomb]] (1996).
* Rhonda Y. Williams. [[The Politics of Public Housing|The Politics of Public Housing: Black Women’s Struggles Against Urban Inequality]] (2004).
* William Appleman Williams. [[The Tragedy of American Diplomacy]] (2009).
* Gwendolyn Wright. [[Building the Dream|Building the Dream: A Social History of Housing in America]] (1983).

Twentieth Century United States

2012-06-21T23:45:23Z

KevinBaker: Created page with " * Luis Alvarez. The Power of the Zoot: Youth Culture and Resistance during World War II (2008). * Karen Anderson. [[Wartime Women|Wartime Women: Sex R..."

* Luis Alvarez. [[The Power of the Zoot|The Power of the Zoot: Youth Culture and Resistance during World War II]] (2008).
* Karen Anderson. [[Wartime Women|Wartime Women: Sex Roles, Family Relations, and the Status of Women During World War II]] (1981).
* Eric Avila. [[Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight|Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight: Fear and Fantasy in Suburban Los Angeles]] (2004).
* Beth Bailey. [[America’s Army|America’s Army: Making the All-Volunteer Force]] (2009).
* Beth Bailey & David Farber. [[The First Strange Place|The First Strange Place: The Alchemy of Race and Sex in World War II Hawaii]] (1992).
* Beth L. Bailey. [[From Front Porch to Back Seat|From Front Porch to Back Seat: Courtship in Twentieth-Century America]] (1989).
* Amy Bridges. [[Morning Glories]] (1999).
* Laura Briggs. [[Reproducing Empire|Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex, Science, and U.S. Imperialism in Puerto Rico]] (2002).
* Alan Brinkley. [[Voices of Protest|Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin, & the Great Depression]] (1983).
* Charlotte Brooks. [[Alien Neighbors, Foreign Friends|Alien Neighbors, Foreign Friends: Asian Americans, Housing, and the Transformation of Urban California]] (2009).
* Lizabeth Cohen. [[A Consumers’ Republic|A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America]] (2003).
* Lizabeth Cohen. [[Making a New Deal|Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939]] (2008).
* Nancy F. Cott. [[Public Vows|Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation]] (2002).
* Mike Davis. [[City of Quartz|City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles]] (2006).
* Mike Davis & Michael Sprinker. [[Magical Urbanism|Magical Urbanism: Latinos Reinvent the US Big City]] (2001).
* Michael J. Dear. [[The Postmodern Urban Condition]] (2001).
* Steven Erie. [[Globalizing L.A.|Globalizing L.A.: Trade, Infrastructure, and Regional Development]] (2004).
* Steven P. Erie. [[Beyond Chinatown|Beyond Chinatown: The Metropolitan Water District, Growth, and the Environment in Southern California]] (2006).
* Elizabeth Ewen. [[Immigrant Women in the Land of Dollars]] (1985).
* Barbara Ferman. [[Challenging the Growth Machine|Challenging the Growth Machine: Neighborhood Politics in Chicago and Pittsburgh]] (1996).
* John M. Findlay. [[Magic Lands|Magic Lands: Western Cityscapes and American Culture After 1940]] (1993).
* Steven Gregory. [[Black Corona|Black Corona: Race and the Politics of Place in an Urban Community]] (1999).
* Jason Hackworth. [[The Neoliberal City|The Neoliberal City: Governance, Ideology, and Development in American Urbanism]] (2006).
* William Ivy Hair. [[Carnival of Fury|Carnival of Fury: Robert Charles and the New Orleans Race Riot of 1900]] (2008).
* Chester W. Hartman. [[Yerba Buena|Yerba Buena: land grab and community resistance in San Francisco,]] (1974).
* Georgina Hickey. [[Hope and Danger in the New South City|Hope and Danger in the New South City: Working-Class Women and Urban Development in Atlanta, 1890-1940]] (2005).
* Richard Hofstadter. [[The American Political Tradition|The American Political Tradition: And the Men Who Made it]] (1989).
* Daniel Horowitz. [[Betty Friedan and the Making of “The Feminine Mystique”|Betty Friedan and the Making of “The Feminine Mystique”: The American Left, the Cold War, and Modern Feminism]] (2000).
[[Non-Plan|Non-Plan: Essays on Freedom, Participation and Change in Modern Architecture and Urbanism]] (2000).
* Daniel Hurewitz. [[Bohemian Los Angeles|Bohemian Los Angeles: and the Making of Modern Politics]] (2007).
* Marilynn S. Johnson. [[The Second Gold Rush|The Second Gold Rush: Oakland and the East Bay in World War II]] (1994).
* Kevin M. Kruse. [[White Flight|White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism]] (2007).
* Matthew D. Lassiter. [[The Silent Majority|The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South]] (2007).
* William R. Leach. [[Land of Desire|Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture]] (1994).
* Michael F. Logan. [[Fighting Sprawl and City Hall|Fighting Sprawl and City Hall: Resistance to Urban Growth in the Southwest]] (1995).
* Roger W. Lotchin. [[Fortress California, 1910-1961|Fortress California, 1910-1961: FROM WARFARE TO WELFARE]] (2002).
* Lisa Lowe. [[Immigrant Acts|Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics]] (1996).
* Robert S. Lynd & Helen Merrell Lynd. [[Middletown|Middletown: A Study in Modern American Culture]] (1959).
* Nancy MacLean. [[Freedom Is Not Enough|Freedom Is Not Enough: The Opening of the American Workplace]] (2008).
* Douglas Massey & Nancy Denton. [[American Apartheid|American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass]] (1993).
* Lisa McGirr. [[Suburban Warriors|Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right]] (2002).
* James Miller. [[Flowers in the Dustbin|Flowers in the Dustbin: The Rise of Rock and Roll, 1947-1977]] (2000).
* Glen M. Mimura. [[Ghostlife of Third Cinema|Ghostlife of Third Cinema: Asian American Film and Video]] (2009).
* John Hull Mollenkopf.|The Contested City]] (1983).
* Armando Navarro. [[The Cristal Experiment|The Cristal Experiment: A Chicano Struggle for Community Control]] (1998).
* Becky M. Nicolaides. [[My Blue Heaven|My Blue Heaven: Life and Politics in the Working-Class Suburbs of Los Angeles, 1920-1965]] (2002).
* Margaret Pugh O’Mara. [[Cities of Knowledge|Cities of Knowledge: Cold War Science and the Search for the Next Silicon Valley]] (2004).
* Gilbert Osofsky. [[Harlem|Harlem: The Making of a Ghetto : Negro New York, 1890-1930]] (1996).
* Rebecca Jo Plant. [[Mom|Mom: The Transformation of Motherhood in Modern America]] (2012).
* Daniel T. Rodgers. [[Contested Truths|Contested Truths: Keywords in American Politics Since Independence]] (1998).
* Adam Rome. [[The Bulldozer in the Countryside|The Bulldozer in the Countryside: Suburban Sprawl and the Rise of American Environmentalism]] (2001).
* Richard Ronald. [[The Ideology of Home Ownership|The Ideology of Home Ownership: Homeowner Societies and the Role of Housing]] (2008).
* Peter Henry Rossi & Robert A. Dentler. [[The Politics of Urban Renewal|The Politics of Urban Renewal: The Chicago Findings]] (1981).
* Roger Sanjek. [[The Future of Us All|The Future of Us All: Race and Neighborhood Politics in New York City]] (1998).
* Bruce Schulman & Bruce J. Schulman. [[The Seventies|The Seventies: The Great Shift In American Culture, Society, And Politics]] (2002).
* Joel Schwartz. [[The New York Approach|The New York Approach: Robert Moses, Urban Liberals, and Redevelopment of the Inner City]] (1993).
* Rickie Solinger. [[Beggars and Choosers|Beggars and Choosers: How the Politics of Choice Shapes Adoption, Abortion, and Welfare in the United States]] (2002).
* Allan H. Spear. [[Black Chicago|Black Chicago: The Making of a Negro Ghetto, 1890-1920]] (1969).
* Todd Swanstrom. [[The Crisis of Growth Politics|The Crisis of Growth Politics: Cleveland, Kucinich, and the Challenge of Urban Populism]] (1988).
* Ronald Takaki. [[Hiroshima|Hiroshima: Why America Dropped the Atomic Bomb]] (1996).
* Rhonda Y. Williams. [[The Politics of Public Housing|The Politics of Public Housing: Black Women’s Struggles Against Urban Inequality]] (2004).
* William Appleman Williams. [[The Tragedy of American Diplomacy]] (2009).
* Gwendolyn Wright. [[Building the Dream|Building the Dream: A Social History of Housing in America]] (1983).

File:Pdx ugb.jpg

2012-06-21T02:30:22Z

KevinBaker:

No Socialism in America: The Failure of America's Socialist Party

2012-06-21T01:59:27Z

KevinBaker: Created page with " (Of note, this paper ignores theoretical or postmodern explanations responsible for Socialism's philosophical failure to take root among a majority of Americans. It focuses on ..."

(Of note, this paper ignores theoretical or postmodern explanations responsible for Socialism's philosophical failure to take root among a majority of Americans. It focuses on the American Socialist Party and the explanations for its eventual electoral irrelevance.)

“In this Republican country amid the fluctuating waves of our social life, someone is always drowning.” —- Nathaniel Hawthorne

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s sentiment resonated with many Americans at the turn of the century. Capitalism had not yet fully developed and many believed its inherent structure promoted inequality and class division. Indianapolis, Indiana of 1901 marked the birthplace of the Socialist Party. Behind the leadership of the dynamic Eugene Debs, the S.P. hoped to harness the nation’s discontent over its economic and social fortunes. In just over a decade, the Socialist Party increased its electoral presence ten-fold (95,000 in 1901 to 900,000 in 1912). Moreover, the S.P. tripled its membership from 41,751 in 1908 to 117,984 in 1912. The Socialist Party heightened class-consciousness among workers, elected officials to office, and aided the fledgling labor movement of early twentieth century America. However, by most historical accounts the Socialist Party by 1925 would no longer pose a legitimate political threat to the more established Democratic and Republican Parties. Even during the Great Depression (1929-40), when capitalism lay sick and enfeebled, the Socialist Party failed to establish inroads in American political culture. How do historians explain this rapid decline? How have views changed over the course of the past twentieth century?

Socialism’s failure can be more clearly understood through an examination of approximately eighty years of literature concerning American Socialism. Literature and histories concerning the Socialist Party of America (S.P.) prove especially illuminating. As historians have placed distance between themselves and the S.P.’s “movement”, historical analysis probed deeper and examined issues from new perspectives. Relationships to the S.P. itself and the mythology surrounding it faded as historians released themselves from “popular historical memory.” While newer histories provide a more complex and illuminating answer to Socialism’s decline, older studies of the S.P. still prove valuable, revealing both the historical tendencies of the movement in which they were written and the relationship of those historians writing on the subject. Thus, for a complete understanding of Socialism and its place in America throughout its twentieth century existence, the sensibilities or “mentalities” of the varying periods must be examined. Beginning with two influential pieces of literature at the turn of the century, proceeding to three works of the 1950’s or Consensus School, and concluding with works of more contemporary historians of the late 1960’s and 1970’s, one can follow not only Socialism’s role and failure within American society, but also pervasive attitudes toward it.
Turn of the Century

In 1906, Werner Sombart produced the essay entitled “Why There is No Socialism in the United States.” According to Sombart, the failure of Socialism to take root in American culture lay in five basic conditions. First, the lack of a feudal past left citizens of the United States rather ignorant on issues of labor and class. The right to vote encompassed so many (women excluded), that only two lines for class determination were left, economic and social. As a result, class lines were severely blurred, making Socialist insurgency difficult. One might argue Sombart incorrectly assumes that class division is a natural manifestation of societal growth, however, considering the persistence of class structure upon societies from the Egyptians to the modern United States, Sombart might well be on solid ground. Second, the overall material prosperity in the United States and its ensuing economic expansion undermined Socialist arguments of the moment. Two myths combined for the third and fourth tenets of Sombart five part outline, the myth of social mobility and the open frontier. Finally, Sombart argued the two party system embedded itself so deeply in American political culture, that third parties had difficulties in even establishing themselves on the ballot.

A second work meriting attention from this early period is Selig Perlman’s, Theory of the Labor Movement. In his text, Perlman asserts many of the same points that Sombart articulated, although, Perlman contributes two important conclusions of his own. First, immigration waves (i.e. 1870-1920) produced severe ethnic cleavages and the influx of these new workers threatened the jobs of older immigrants and “native” born workers. Secondly, the lack of a socially and physically settled wage earning class blunted class-consciousness. Interestingly, both Perlman and Sombart, concluded that while Socialism had not yet established itself within U.S. boundaries, both authors believed its manifestation on American soil was a matter of time. While Perlman and Sombart’s points have been debated, both authors’ viewpoints resonate throughout the literature of the twentieth century. In fact both, Irving Howe (writing in 1977) and Eric Foner (writing in 1984) dispute both Sombart’s and Perlman’s conclusions (Howe labels many of Sombart’s conclusions “ahistorical” and “too Marxist”) eighty years after their publication. Thus, one can only conclude while flawed, Sombart and Perlman raised several significant points concerning Socialism’s battle with the external forces of American culture.

== The Consensus School —- 1950’s ==

Though the Socialist Party died as an electoral force sometime in the 1920’s, historical inquiry into the subject would expand thirty years later. Cold War tensions played no small part in this renewed interest. While some historians focused on the internal matters that led to the S.P.’s downfall, others looked at the external factors (i.e. American political and social culture) that prevented Socialism’s establishment. Eric Foner emphasizes this point in his essay, “Why is there No Socialism in the United States?”:

Thus far, the answers to the socialism problem have been largely ‘external’ … There are also explanations that might be described as ‘internal’ – those that focus on the nature and presumed errors of radical movements themselves. Such an approach has an obvious appeal for more optimistic left oriented historians. For if essentially, unchanging aspects of American society … are responsible for the failure of Socialism there appears to be little reason to hope for a future revival of socialist fortunes.

Additionally, while external factors may certainly be one explanation Foner warns historians regarding the dangers of such an approach, “Finally, there is the problem of proposed answers that simply explain too much. Descriptions of unchanging American ideology, or timeless aspects of the American social order such as mobility, leave little room for understanding the powerful American radical tradition based upon cross-class movements and appeals to moral sentiment rather than economic interest. Nor can they explain those periods when socialist politics did attract widespread support.” Thus, historians taking the external approach tend to make broad generalizations and rarely historicize the historical moment. However, internal writers are forced to historicize the moment because they must identify forces acting on the Socialist Party. The actors in internal histories have motivations based on historical contingencies which do well to explain the direction and shape of the movement at that moment.

However, with the above noted, many historians have come to similar conclusions as to when the S.P. became obsolete. Moreover, most of the historical investigation of this period found similar external and internal forces to be at fault for the S.P.’s demise. Seymour Martin and Gary Marks entitled It Didn’t Happen Here: Why Socialism Failed in the United States, actually reasserts some of Sombart and Perlman’s assertions. Therefore, despite nearly 100 years of historical inquiry, historians seem to be mired in the same spot as Sombart in 1906.

Ira Kipnis’s The Socialist Movement 1897-1912 (1952) examines the Socialist Movement and more specifically the S.P. during its rapid ascension within the American political system. According to Kipnis, the Socialist Party formed in 1901 behind the leadership of American Marxists who believed capitalism eroded economic equality and corrupted democracy. Few members within the party regarded reform with much credibility, “The Socialist Party … argued that such reforms could never end the basic contradictions which were responsible for the decline in liberty and equality. The Socialists held that freedom and capitalism … was a contradiction in terms,” . Kipnis argues that the S.P. did impact American political and social culture:

It [the Socialist Party] elected well over two thousand of its members to public office. It secured passage of hundreds of reforms, and contributed to the adoption of many times more. It won position and influence in the American Federation of Labor and led in the organization of a small but militant revolutionary union (IWW). It publicized inequities in American economic, social, and political life, and participated in the struggle to restore substance to the nation’s democratic ideals. Clearly, whatever may have been the objective difficulties in advocating socialism in the wealthiest and most democratic capitalistic country in the world, the Socialist Party had achieved some notable success.

Ultimately, Kipnis’s work focuses on the internal factors that brought about its demise. Briefly, Kipnis attributed the S.P.’s decline to internal problems such as opportunism, racism, lack of intraparty democracy, and factionalism. Of these four central issues, the factionalism of the S.P. resonates throughout historical discourse from the Consensus School to more recent interpretations. Kipnis argues that factionalism was an under current within the S.P. from its earliest formation. While workers and union leaders made up the left wing, the right wing, according to Kipnis, consisted of middle class lawyers, professionals, and small businessmen. Subsequently, each held different social and economic interests; the left fought for a complete restructuring of the economic and political system, while the right wing believed it could transform the structural form through elected office. The inability of the left and right wings of he party to come to an ideological consensus undermined party unity and led to a party split in 1919 (not discussed in Kipnis’s work). Moreover, Kipnis places the blame for intraparty dissent on the shoulders of the “right wing” elements in the S.P., “The shortcomings of the Left wing were serious enough. But the major responsibility for the failure of the movement must rest upon the Right wing … It was the ‘constructive Socialists’ who controlled the party and determined policy and activity. And it was they who turned the party into what they themselves called an opportunist political organization devoted to winning public office for its leaders,” . However, Kipnis’s discussion of the left, center and right wings within the party, along with several other arguments draws criticism from recent historians, which will be examined shortly. Noting the emergence of Wilsonian Liberalism and Theodore Roosevelt’s progressivism, Kipnis acknowledges their negative impact on Socialism, yet ultimately he argues, “The Socialist Party had been organized to combat institutions, practices, and values of monopoly capitalism. Instead, it had been corrupted by them.”

While Kipnis chose to focus on the fifteen year period in which the Socialist Party enjoyed its greatest prominence, David Shannon in his party history, The Socialist Party of America (1955) traces the development and growth of the S.P. from its birth in 1901 to its irrelevance in the 1940’s. Considered by most historians, as one of the standard histories concerning the Socialist Party, Shannon also focuses on the internal issues that brought American Socialism to its grave. Although his historical inquiry revolves around internal factors, Shannon does acknowledge the difficulty the S.P. encountered externally in American society, “But despite all the shortcomings of the Socialist Party, its failure was not primarily its own fault; the failure of the Socialists was due less to their errors than to basic traditions and conditions in American society which could do little or nothing to change.” Many of Shannon’s external explanations follow Sombart and Perlman’s arguments with two notable additions: 1) the American fear that Socialism would subvert individualism and 2) the American political need for instant gratification. According to Shannon, the S.P. suffered internally form an inability to define itself. The party seemed unsure of whether it was a pressure group, revolutionary sect, political forum, or an electoral political party. This deficiency along with a lack of interest in local issues, the failure in courting organized labor, the seemingly inherent factionalism, the poor system of communication between the public and the party, and its negative attitude toward political organizing all helped to undermine the S.P.

Unlike Shannon and Kipnis, Daniel Bell approaches the S.P. from a more ideological point of view in his 1960 work, The End of Ideology. Chapter 13 entitled “The Failure of American Socialism” examines socialism not in stark historical terms, but instead Bell adopts a philosophical approach, “It is my argument that the failure of the socialist movement in the United States was rooted in its ability to resolve a basic dilemma of ethics and politics: the socialist movement, by the way in which it stated its goal, and by the way in which it rejected the capitalist order as a whole could not relate itself to specific problems of social action in the here-and-now, give-and-take political world.” Bell’s ideological approach therefore, places less emphasis on internal factors such as those discussed before and replaces them with broader philosophical issues. According to Bell, a distinct feature of modernity is the separation of ethics and politics:

But a distinguishing feature of modern society is the separation of ethics and politics – since no group can, through the civil arm, impose its moral conceptions on the whole society; and ideology – the façade of general interest and universal values which masks specific self-interest – replaces ethics. But that faithful entry into politics … becomes a far reaching goal which demands a radical commitment that necessarily transforms politics into an all-or-none battle.

Extending this idea to the Socialist Party clarifies Bell’s argument. Following Shannon’s assertion that the S.P. failed to define its purpose and role, Bell’s ideological argument clearly delineates the S.P.’s inherent weakness since political action demands absolute dedication. An organization that fails to vigorously promote its agenda and actively organize politically can not hope to attain or establish itself permanently in the confines of mainstream society. Moreover, Bell argues that by opposing the capitalist system, the S.P. left itself on the political margins never resolving whether to work for change as part of the political structure or to revolt and rebuild America’s economic and political edifice. Moreover, Bell criticizes both Eugene Debs and Norman Thomas, the two prominent leaders of Socialism in America. Bell argues that Debs “lacked the hard-headedness of the politician, the ability to take the moral absolutes and break them down to the particulars with the fewest necessary compromises,” while Thomas “distrusted his own generation and surrounded himself with considerably younger men who stood in admiring and uncritical relation to him,” and took every political attack personally. Much of Bell’s argument incorporates various philosophical arguments ranging from Marxism to Weber’s “ethics of responsibility and conscience.” Furthermore, like Shannon and Kipnis before him, Bell notes the intense factionalism that most historians seem to agree weakened Socialism’s cause.

While similarities and differences abound in each work, what themes or arguments surface repeatedly throughout the period? First, all three authors note the intense factionalism of the S.P. Shannon and Bell both see the S.P.’s inability to define itself and its role as a crucial problem in the movement’s evolution. Kipnis fails to discuss external factors to the extent that Shannon does, and Bell’s discussion is so grounded in philosophy (mostly European) that the closest he comes to discussing external factors is his discussion of American religious tradition. Kipnis and Shannon both mark 1912 as the watershed year for American Socialism, with every year following it a gradual decline in the S.P.’s political relevance. As will be discussed shortly, historians hotly contest this view. Each author, including Bell, notes that Socialism lost many adherents to Wilsonian Liberalism and later, as only Shannon discusses (because of his more expansive periodization), to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. Bell even goes so far as to label the S.P. “irrelevant” in the context of Wilsonian Liberalism.
The Late 1960’s and 1970’s

Much of the debate revolves around when the Socialist Party actually declined. As will be discussed, many current historians do not see 1912 as the S.P.’s last gasp of political relevance. Moreover, they attribute Socialism’s failure not so much to internal factors as to the structure of American political culture.

In 1963, James Weinstein’s article “Socialism’s Hidden Heritage: Scholarship Reinforces Political Mythology” (in the journal Studies on the Left) directly assaults the Consensus view of the Socialist Movement. Arguing that historical scholarship failed to probe deeply enough to find the true reasons for Socialism’s failure, Weinstein asserts that previous histories either focused exclusively on parties, thus obscuring larger more complex issues or “The historians of the early Socialist Party have been incapable of transcending their own memories of , and relationships to, the faction ridden movement of the decades following 1920.” Weinstein chided previous historical scholarship for its “obsession” with factionalism and its stereotypical analysis of leftist and rightist politics. Focusing his attack on two authors discussed here, Weinstein first deconstructs Kipnis’s The Socialist Movement 1897-1912. According to Weinstein, Kipnis underestimates Socialism’s resiliency by suggesting its demise post-1912. Instead, Weinstein suggests that the movement sustained itself and even built support. While many of the historians of the Consensus period argued that World War I greatly damaged the party (it took an isolationist i.e. anti-war stance), Weinstein argues that W.W.I actually delivered new constituencies to the Party. Additionally, Weinstein derides Kipnis’s stereotypical analysis of the left and right wings of the party. Kipnis argued that racism, predominantly from the center and right within the Party, undermined the movement. Weinstein argues that “The differences between right and left were frequently rhetorical, more of mood than of substance; and where they were of substance they were as often the opposite of what one would expect as not.” Thus, Weinstein disputes the attributes that Kipnis ascribes to the left (i.e. non-racist) and right (racist) wings of the party. Ultimately, Weinstein argues, “In short, none of Kipnis’s reasons for the rapid decline of the Socialist Party after 1912 stand up. This, however, should not be too surprising since the thesis of rapid decline is itself invalid, as we shall see.”

Daniel Bell’s work also receives criticism from Weinstein. Bell, Weinstein points out, approaches the topic from a rigidly ideological standpoint. Thus, Bell while correctly searching for “the reason in the nature of the movement,” fails to escape his narrow focus, “Bell’s thesis is that the Socialist Movement, because it rejected capitalism, ‘could not relate itself to the specific problems of social action in the here-and-now, give-and-take political world.’ This means … that American Socialism never was a viable movement, and that whatever fleeting popularity it had was the result of fortuitous circumstance,” . Challenging Bell’s assertions, Weinstein charges Bell with using the 1912 rapid decline thesis as a substantiated way to support his own incorrect argument, “Thus, rapid decline of the movement after 1912 becomes a necessary condition for the logical validation of the entire thesis.” Shannon escapes much of Weinstein’s wrath, receiving criticism for providing party history, which Weinstein claims are intrinsically narrow in their focus.

In 1967, Weinstein had completed his own work on the Socialist Party, The Decline of Socialism in America 1912-1925. Within the text, Weinstein disputes the 1912 rapid decline model, instead arguing that the S.P. maintained its position from 1912-1919, beginning its true decline with its Communist split in 1919. However, Weinstein argues that even the period from 1919-1925 the S.P. manifested itself in different forms from various laborite movements to the Communist Party. Weinstein focuses on the Socialist Movement rather than the Socialist Party, thus his emphasis lay in Socialism and not the political relevance of the S.P.:

The Party had reached the peak of its strength just halfway to 1924. As we have seen, its decline was not a simple or steady process of disintegration. From 1912 until the United States entered the war, the Socialist Party remained a vital radical force in America., despite the widespread disillusionment with the world Socialist movement that followed the failure of the European Socialists to prevent, or even to oppose, the war in 1914.

Unlike Kipnis, who blames the S.P. failure on the party’s right wing, Weinstein looks to 1919 and lays blame on the antics of the left wing, “But it was the Left that had pursued policies that made the split inevitable,” . Concerning the S.P.’s political relevance, the key point of distinction between Weinstein and the Consensus School is that Weinstein argues that 1919 proved to be the ultimate undoing of the S.P., “The point is that both the Communists and the Socialists had been hopelessly caught up in conflict over forms organization, attitudes toward fellow Socialists, and concepts of strategy and tactics did not grow out of American experience or the problems transforming American society. The legacy of 1919 was the alienation of American Socialism,” .

Michael Harrington provides yet another perspective on the Socialist Party in his essay, “The Socialist Party” in Arthur Schlesinger’s History of United States Political Parties. Charting Socialism from its nineteenth century “utopian” phase to its convention in 1968, Harrington also argues against the rapid decline model presented by the Consensus School. Much like Weinstein, Harrington argues that while the Party contracted post-1912, it remained a vital political presence. Furthermore, Harrington argues that while the Socialist Party did not retain visibility of a major party, social democratic impulses in America remained active (although in uniquely American forms such as defense of “Republican ideals”). Disagreeing with Bell, Harrington disputes Bell’s claim that the S.P. failed to respond to problems of the present pointing to the S.P.’s non-intervention stance regarding W.W.I. Moreover, while many of the older historians (Shannon, Kipnis) and Weinstein argue that the S.P. compromised itself with Norman Thomas toward middle class orientation, Harrington suggests that change in the Party made realignment necessary. Organized labor had thrown its support behind Roosevelt and the New Deal, leaving the Socialist Party with middle class leftism. Ironically, Harrington agrees with Shannon, Kipnis, and Bell regarding the factionalism that constantly shook up the party. Unlike any of the other authors, Harrington does not assert that the S.P. post-1919 became an irrelevant vestige of the past. Instead, he argues that until the early 1960’s, the Party influenced America’s underlying social democratic belief and labor movements. (note of disclosure, Harrington himself was a member and leader of the Socialist Movement for some twenty years).

Irving Howe’s Socialism and America (1977) approaches the question as to why Socialism failed in America differently from the previous works. Instead of asking why Socialism failed, he asks: Why should it have succeeded? According to Howe, “There never was a chance for major Socialist victory in this society, this culture.” Despite writing seventy years after Sombart and Perlman, Howe disputes each factor that both authors attributed to American Socialism’s lack of development. Framing the arguments differently from the previous authors, Howe maintains not that the Socialist Party could not decide what role it wished to serve, rather “American Socialism tried to combine two roles – that of moral protest and political reform which in America had traditionally been largely separate, and which our political arrangements make it very difficult to unite.” Howe follows much of Bell’s argument concerning Socialism not only here, but also in other areas. Unlike Shannon, Weinstein, Kipnis, Harrington, or even Bell, Howe does not discuss Socialism’s decline or the controversy surrounding the moment of its decline. Rather, he discusses the issue in a manner most similar to Bell. Similar to Bell, Howe emphasizes theory and ideology over “hard” historical fact. While he places blame on the S.P. itself, Howe asserts that “American Exceptionalism” along with the “distinctiveness of American culture” also undermined Socialist aspirations, “I believe that the distinctiveness of American culture has played the more decisive part in thwarting socialist fortunes. And even after both kinds of reasons – the socioeconomic and the cultural – are taken into account, there remains an important margin with regard to intelligence or obtuseness, correct or mistaken strategies, which helped to determine whether American Socialism was to be a measurable force or an isolated sect. That the American socialist movement must take upon itself a considerable portion of the responsibility for its failure, I have treed to show in three earlier chapters.” Thus, unlike previous authors, Howe blames three parties for Socialism’s decline. Howe concludes that for Socialism to ever play a role in American society, it must find a way to be both moral reformer and political activist, “It’s not a matter of choosing roles of moral witness and political actor. It’s a matter of finding ways through which link properly the utopian moralism of the protester with the political realism of the activist … “

== Conclusion ==

Obviously, historians distinguish reasons for the movement’s eventual failure differently. Many historians view Socialism as an American impossibility. According to these historians, external factors prevented socialism from gaining a foothold in American political and social culture. While other more optimistic historians view Socialism’s failure as a result of internal factors. Thus, such historians argue that problems like factionalism or the inability to compromise undermined the Socialist Movement. Which proves more accurate? Arguments based on external factors such as American exceptionalism (some historians might suggest the belief in such exceptionalism deserves to be identified as a weakness) suffer from broad generalization. External arguments frequently make broad generalizations and fail to historicize historical moments. Also, these arguments often cut both ways. Social mobility is offered as an external factor defeating socialism, yet as Eric Foner points out:

Plausible as they appear, the ‘success of capitalism’ and ‘mobility’ approaches raise as many questions as they answer … More importantly, the precise implications of the ability to acquire property for class consciousness and socialism are far more problematical than is often assumed . A venerable tradition of analysis, dating back at least as far as Alexis de Toqueville, insists far from promoting political stability, social stability is a destabilizing force, raising expectations faster than can be statisfied and thus encouraging demands further change

Again, Foner points this out, “As we have seen, all the explanations that have been proposed – the internal and the external, the social, ideological, economic, and cultural have a certain merit, and all seem to have weaknesses as well. Nor can we simply toss them all together in a kind of mixed salad and feel satisfied with the result.”

What does Foner suggest? Foner does not argue so much for the perfect historical interpretation as much as he argues for new lenses from which to view the issue. Questions like “Why is there no Socialism in the United States?” are too simplistic “… the socialism question rests on a number of assumptions that may not survive careful analysis … In the case of socialism, the premise is that under capitalism, the working class will develop class consciousness, expressed in unions, and a labor or socialist political party, and that consequently the failure of either to emerge must be the result of some outside interference.” Thus, Foner argues why should this pattern be inherently assumed. Historical guarantees do not exist. Contingency alone prevents such developments, historical events and movements are specific to the forces at large during that particular moment. Therefore, new questions concerning socialism should be asked such as “whether the experience of socialism in the United States is, in reality, exceptional, or whether it represents an extreme example of the dilemma of socialism throughout western society,” or “why is the United States the only advanced capitalist nation whose political system lacks a social democratic presence and whose working class lacks socialist class consciousness?”

Socialism has changed since Werner Sombart’s time, just as the capitalist system in America has changed. Laissez-faire capitalism died with the onset of the Great Depression. Subsidies, corporate welfare, social welfare, the SEC, and various other forms of government largesse and regulation have altered the modern understanding of both capitalism and socialism. Even the socialist parties of Europe have abandoned true socialism, choosing to focus on the distribution of wealth and resources over dogmatic socialist arguments. Thus, no pure system exists. Just as these systems have incorporated outside influences, so must historians begin to weave an argument that successfully incorporates internal and external factors. New questions must be asked. Can socialism be considered present only when a viable class-consciousness exists or when a socialist political party exerts influence or can socialism remain relevant through other means (i.e. subsidies, social welfare)?

Ryan Reft

Revolution and Slavery in the Atlantic World

2012-06-21T01:57:13Z

KevinBaker: /* Conclusion */

“The liberty and equality which these blacks acclaimed as they went into battle meant far more to them than the same words in the mouths of the French. And in a revolutionary struggle these things are worth many regiments.”

— C.L.R James, The Black Jacobins

“No Patriot leader had been more firmly persuaded than Jefferson of the moral superiority of Americans; and none was more astonished and chagrined when they revealed during the postwar period that they were not the paragons of patriotism, spartanism, rectitude he had supposed them to be.”

— John Chester Miller, A Wolf by the Ears

For all eighteenth century societies encountering the Enlightenment, a delicate balancing act unfolded. Thirty years after the battles of Lexington and Concord, America, France, and Haiti all had undergone revolution. Though each differed in context, the three revolutions drew upon the ideological ferment of the Enlightenment. Accordingly, the manner in which the Lockean and Rousseauan beliefs influenced revolutionaries differs. The presence of slavery in America and Haiti altered the trajectory of each revolution. If during the American Revolution, some revolutionaries like Thomas Jefferson questioned the legitimacy of human bondage, these questions faded in independence. In France, attitudes toward the Haitian Revolution fluctuated as well. In moments some French leaders called for emancipation while in others, they demanded the institution’s reestablishment. Across the Atlantic world, slaves, free blacks, and mulattoes (more so in Haiti then the former British colonies) absorbed the same ideologies as revolutionary leaders. The conflict between hopes for freedom among those enslaved, demands of liberty from those colonized, and the fears of those grasping at post revolutionary calm collided.

Historians often reflect the time period in which they write. C.L.R. James proves no exception. James’ The Black Jacobins represents a Marxist interpretation of the Haitian Revolution and its leaders. Published in 1938, James’ work exudes the same revolutionary spirit as his subjects, “Pericles on Democracy, Paine on the Rights of Man, the Declaration of Independence, the Communist Manifesto, these are some of the political documents which … have moved men and will always move them, for the writers …. strike chords and awaken aspirations that sleep in the hearts of the majority of every age.” Using archival sources and interviews from survivors, James provides a case study of the Haitian Revolution. Black Jacobins remains the standard by which all other accounts of the uprising are measured. Speaking to the colonized peoples of the Caribbean and Africa, the work promotes the Revolution’s successes while underlining its failures, “the blacks of Africa are more advanced, nearer ready than were the slaves of San Domingo”.

Black Jacobins begins in Haiti prior to the French Revolution. With an established Haitian race based class system, the island’s society rested on a complex collection of “small whites”, “great whites”, free blacks, mulattoes, and slaves. Additionally, the French colony remained divided between three differing economic regions the “maritime bourgeoisie” north, the less populous western region which featured a large mulatto population, and the southern province which more than the others, stands apart because of the vast majority of mulattoes present. When the French Revolution erupts, the north, west, and southern sections respond according to their own interests. The north, controlled by white merchants and lawyers, opposed the colonial administration believing its interference in their political and economic affairs retarded their growth. Promises of widespread liberties made many in the North anxious, while mulattos in the neighboring areas embraced France’s revolutionary fervor. Despite claims of freedom for themselves, propertied free blacks and mulattoes did not extend such promises to black slaves in Haiti. The revolving alliances that emerged reflect protection of these interests, all of which excluded Haiti’s slave population. While the mixed nature of mulattos left them alienated from all other groups, their prevalence made them a vital ally to both whites and blacks alike.

James gives credit to the events and ideals of the French Revolution for contributing to Haiti’s own uprising. For example, French attitudes toward Haiti’s planter class fluctuated. When the north’s “maritime bourgeoisie” appealed for British intervention, French perceptions of mulattoes and free blacks changed. Remaining loyal to France, French political leaders begin contemplating black citizenship. Revolutionary leaders, free blacks, mulattoes, and slaves all demanded the revolution’s promises of citizenship and freedom, while the vast majority of whites attempted to dampen such hopes. Juxtaposing the role of working class French citizens and black slaves in Haiti, James argues “it was the quarrel between bourgeoisie and monarchy that brought the Paris masses on the political stage. It was the quarrel between whites and Mulattoes that woke the sleeping slaves.”

A traditional Marxist, a class based interpretation of the revolution informs James’ view. While acknowledging the role of race, James clearly points to divisions that arise between free blacks and mulattoes and slaves. For James, property owners “are the most energetic flag wagers and patriots in every country, but only so long as they enjoy their possessions; to safe guard those they desert God, King and Country in a twinkling.” This did not exclude groups one might thought sensitive to revolutionary freedoms, “Mulatto proprietors … preferred their slaves to liberty and equality.”

Though James clearly credits Haitian slaves as the driving force behind their revolution, its leaders figure prominently. Obviously, no leader emerges as clearly as Toussaint L’Ouverture. Unlike the equivocating propertied classes, be they mulattoes, free blacks, or whites, L’Ouverture fully committed the revolution to the ideals put forth by the French, “Toussiant was whole man. The man into which the French Revolution had made him demanded that the relation with the France of liberty, equality, fraternity and the abolition of slavery without a debate should be maintained.” L’Ouverture continually maneuvered among the three European powers (France, Britain, and Spain) to ensure these rights. Acknowledging L’Ouverture’s political and economic wisdom, James also notes his inability to explain his decisions to followers and rivals. For example, the mulattoes of the west resented L’Ouverture’s reconciliation with former planters. Former slaves disliked his strict rule over their labor. Though committed to abolition, L’Ouverture believed Haiti needed to retain economic and political ties to France. L’Ouveture illustrated a nuanced grasp of Haiti’s complicated economic and political situation, but having never articulated such motives properly, they evaporated as the revolution unfolded. Dessalines lacked the grace and reserve of his superior, but he exhibited the necessary brutal exactitude to carry the revolution to its logical conclusion.

Almost 30 years later, David Brion Davis’ The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution 1770-1823 examined similar themes but from a comparative perspective. Focusing on the Atlantic world, Davis’s work explores the rise of abolitionism and its relation to capitalist forces (specifically the industrial revolution), religious ferment and ideological developments. Davis’ work also displays aspects of Marxist thought especially in regard to attitudes toward the English poor by abolitionists, “As reformers grappled with the problems of crime, pauperism, and labor discipline, they seemed to be unconsciously haunted by the image of the slave plantation.” Abolitionists ignored the “invisible chains being forged at home” but recoiled at those created by slavery. Unlike James who placed an inordinate amount of stress on propertied interests, Davis notes the intersection of ideology, religious beliefs, and economics, “[anti-slavery] ideology emerged from a convergence of complex religious, intellectual, and literary trends – trends which are by no means reducible to the economic interests of particular classes but which must be understood as part of a larger transformation in attitudes toward labor, property, and individual responsibility.” Yet if such changes created classes attracted to anti-slavery, economic processes also deepened American dependence on plantation slavery, “Slave grown cotton had become indispensable for the industrial development of Lancashire as well as New England. And if slave labor itself seemed repugnant to capitalist ideology, there was little ground for the hope that that the free play of market forces would soon undermine a supposedly wasteful, unproductive, and unprofitable system of labor.”

Davis’ comparative framework enables his work to explore ideological and economic conflicts that Black Jacobins stresses. Juxtaposing Lord Dunmore’s proclamation promising freedom to American slaves who took arms against the Patriots with Leger Felicite Sonthonax’s call to “rebellious slaves” in the countryside, Davis illustrates the contrasts of emancipation of the two revolutions. By Davis’ lights, Lord Dunmore’s proclamation failed, “Several hundred Negroes succeeded in joining Lord Dunmore’s small army, but their forays along the coast were generally unsuccessful.” Whereas Sonthonax’s rescued his forces due to “some ten thousand blacks [storming] down upon Le Cap, and it was the pro-planter governor, accompanied by most of the surviving white residents, who fled by the sea..” Using Black Jacobins description of the event, Davis compares the context in which each “call to arms” occurred, explaining the subsequent results.

Davis acknowledges the importance of the Haitian Revolution and its widespread effects on the Atlantic world. Still, he notes the unique social structure of the French colonies along with the influence of the French Revolution made analogies to the American South difficult. Pointing to the divided nature of the islands’ society, “the slogans of liberty, equality, and fraternity would have quite different meanings for these fragmented groups. And they would have meaning altogether different for the Negro slaves who listened to heated political discussion or who, in the person of Toussaint L’Ouverture, even pondered the stirring and inflammatory words of the Abbe Raynal.” With that said, Enlightenment ideals, grievances toward mercantilist policies, and resentment of European officials (as in the British colonies) fueled Haitian ideas concerning liberty.

If English abolitionism spread as result of several forces, why did efforts emanating from the American Revolution stall following the conflict’s conclusion? As Davis points out, few northern governments attempted to legislate abolition. In Massachusetts, where revolutionary ideals found some of their most militant expression before and during the fight for independence, “judicial decisions eroded the institution.” Religious movements like the Great Awakening encouraged anti-slavery beliefs even in parts of the South (though usually such regions featured a relative larger Quaker population) “Indigenous questioning” of slavery in the South failed to create an anti-slavery/pro-slavery binary. Instead, “it led to a resolution which channeled idealism toward the goals of Christian trusteeship … which committed the entire society to the moral defense of the slaveholder.”

Ideas of liberty and independence were not based on abstractions. Property ownership created the independence upon which many revolutionary ideals rested. Drawing from Edmund Morgan, Davis emphasizes that slavery freed the South from fear of a dangerous landless white underclass. American colonists “feared and mistrusted men, regardless of race, who lacked any tangible stake in society … it follows that eighteenth century southern leaders could promote the ideal of a free white yeomanry and profess allegiance to the rights of Englishmen precisely because black slaves had taken the place of lower cast whites.”

Following the American Revolution, political leadership on the issue of slavery faded. Thomas Jefferson’s evolving beliefs illustrate this collapse of political will. In his early years, Jefferson argued for the eventual emancipation of slaves, but also their deportation. Jefferson never viewed blacks as equals. Concerned with maintaining his reputation, from which his political power emanated, Jefferson exhibited an increasing reticence regarding slavery. In A Summary View of the Rights of British America, Jefferson abdicated American responsibility for the “peculiar institution’ blaming British imposition. In Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson criticizes the institution for its effects on Masters and their children. However, the passage of time dulled Jefferson’s enthusiasm. In addition, his own economic difficulties prohibited him from encouraging emancipation, “Jefferson was at this time in critical financial straits and was faced with the need of selling land or slaves … “ Even worse “when the chips were down, as in the Missouri crisis, he threw his weight behind slavery’s expansion, and bequeathed to the South the image of anti-slavery as a Federalist mask for political and economic exploitation.” In keeping with the comparative nature of his work, Davis discusses Jefferson in the context of his contemporaries Frenchman Moreau de Saint-Mery and Englishman Bryn Edwards. Though the two Europeans opposed the anti-slavery movement, they expressed a certain appreciation for blacks that eluded Jefferson, “one gets the distinct impression that both Moreau and Edwards actually liked blacks.” Thus, economic interest, political relevancy, and racism diminished Jefferson’s abolitionism.

Edmund Morgan’s 1975 work American Slavery, American Freedom explores the dynamics of pre-Revolutionary Virginia from its failed Roanoke colony to the eve of revolution. Unlike Davis’ work, Morgan confines his focus to Virginia’s pre-revolutionary existence. Moreover, American Slavery, American Freedom establishes the trajectory of slavery’s establishment in America’s oldest colony. As mortality rates declined, English immigration diminished, competition with sugar plantations in the West Indies receded, Jamestown delayed the adoption of slavery. Rather than an inevitability, slavery emerged out of a complex set of circumstances and practices which developed in seventeenth century Virginia.

Morgan’s work illustrates the impact of changing demographics, economics, and social/political structures that shaped the colony’s eventual adoption of slavery. Early colonists to Jamestown consisted of primarily gentlemen and indentured servants. Land existed in great abundance but workers did not. The development of tobacco as a viable means of support increased the colony’s dependence on indentured servants. Excessively harsh treatment of the indentured became common in Jamestown society. The behavior of masters toward their servants, established a precedent of severity that was later easily extended to slaves. Additionally, before the adoption of slavery, Virginian planters had created a system of plantation labor, thus, allowing for a smooth transition to large scale plantation bondage.

By the late seventeenth century, growing numbers of former servants, spatial growth, and the presence of Native Americans constricted the population. Landless whites accumulated. Bacon’s Rebellion erupted when the landless masses demanded the colonial government abrogate its agreements with the surrounding tribes so that new land could be settled. Land remained necessary not only for subsistence but man’s freedom, “Men who labored on their own land grew not only food but independence. No would be tyrant could starve them into submission or win their vote with paltry promises.” As acknowledged by Davis, Morgan emphasizes the importance of slavery as a means to extend Republican ideals. The system of slavery served as a leveler for Virginian society. All white men by dint of their skin color could claim some notion of equality. In addition, having solved their labor problems, many average whites could attain land, “during the colonial period there were enough [men] who did own land to make Virginia, in the eyes of Virginians at least, a land to fit the picture in republican textbooks.”

Both Davis and Morgan note “the seventeenth century had seen the simultaneous rise of republican thinking and of that contempt for the poor.” This same fear of masses of indigents, fed Jefferson’s fear of a manufacturing society. For large scale manufacturers produced a dehumanized landless poor. As part of justification for slavery, racism developed. Prior to the establishment of slavery in Virginia, black indentured servants frequently labored with their white counterparts. However, slavery required an explanation. The hostility expressed for decades toward Native Americans transferred to blacks. The simultaneous degradation of the poor made this even easier, “Racism thus absorbed in Virginia the fear and contempt that men in England … felt for the inarticulate lower classes. Racism made it possible for white Virginians to develop a devotion to the equality that English republicans had declared the soul of liberty.” Furthermore, racism enabled Virginians to lump “Indians, mulattoes, and Indians in a single pariah class”. Free individuals from these groups clung “to their freedom. But it was made plain to them and to the white population that their color rendered freedom in appropriate for them … they were denied the right to vote or hold office or to testify in court proceedings.” By the same logic, “Virginians had paved the way for a similar lumping of small and large planters in a single master class.” Morgan, as others after him, identifies the foundation upon which Virginian Republicanism rested on “their power over the men and women they held in bondage.”

According to Morgan, “the most ardent American republicans were Virginians … “ If true, John Chester Miller’s The Wolf by the Ears: Thomas Jefferson and Slavery explores Virginia’s most famous Republican and his elusive positions on slavery. Published two years after American Slavery, American Freedom, Miller focuses exclusively on the sage of Monticello. As Davis noted, Jefferson’s views on slavery as a young man contrasted markedly with those he held later in life. Jefferson’s// A Summary View of the Rights of British America// blamed George the III for “foisting slavery upon the American people.” Favoring gradual abolition and subsequent deportation, Jefferson made efforts to reduce slavery in his home state. His apparent fear and loathing of racial mixture contributed to this position. If Davis describes the Lord Dunmore episode in order to illustrate the stark differences between two Atlantic world revolutions, Miller explores Jefferson’s manipulation of the incident for different ends. Miller’s work uses the episode to illustrate the contradictions present in even the more strident youthful anti-slavery Jefferson. Accusing England of fomenting “racial, servile war,” the Declaration of Independence “asserts the right of white Americans to rebel against attempts to reduce them to slavery” but denies inferentially, in the context of the events of 1775-1776, the right of black slaves to rebel against their masters in order to attain their freedom”

For Jefferson, history amounted to a linear line of progress. If slavery were not abolished in his generation, subsequent generations would. The abolition of Virginia’s slave trade in 1778 serves as one example. If civilization moved according to his beliefs complete abolition would arrive soon. Yet, the same process that abolished the slave trade in Virginia also tightened rules for slavery. Like Davis and Morgan, Miller refers to Jefferson’s comments in Notes on the State of Virginia. In contrast, Miller examines the motivations for his prejudice toward blacks, “Jefferson was under powerful psychological compulsion to believe that the blacks were innately inferior. Had he thought that he and his fellow Virginians were keeping in subjugation and debasement thousands of potential poets, philosophers, scientists, and men of letters … he could not have endured the … the continued existence of slavery.” In this way, he could justify his own participation in the institution. However, by doing so, Jefferson greatly undermined his own appeal for their emancipation. Perhaps more importantly, the “rebuffs” Jefferson experienced in regard to his appeals, led him to abandon any public “effort to abolish slavery in Virginia.” Advocating for abolition weakened his own political standing among many of his fellow Virginians, which in turn made his attempts less likely to succeed. As a gradualist, Jefferson believed his generation had done all it could, the remaining work must be done by those that followed.

Ideals for any political leader do not exist in a vacuum. Circumstance and time function to alter perceptions. Miller traces these developments in Jefferson’s thought. Several historical developments affected Jefferson’s views on slavery. First, the Haitian Revolution alarmed President Jefferson. He fully believed, that “black crews and supercargoes from St. Domingo would soon be at work spreading subversive notions among American slaves.” Fearing widespread racial conflict, Jefferson hoped to “emancipate and deport black slaves without delay… “ His fears subsided, as political maneuvering between France and the US led to the Louisiana Purchase. Still, Jefferson clung to the new belief that Haiti would be the perfect destination for future emancipated slaves. C.L.R James makes little mention of U.S. interests, only that they impeded efforts by Haitian Revolutionaries. However, James’ L’Ouverture exhibits a similar political flexibility. Adjusting to the shifting winds of the French Revolution, L’Ouverture in some moments fought for King and country and in others for Republicanism. In accordance, L’Ouverture maneuvered among alliances with European powers. Of course, he did so out of necessity. Moreover, the Haitian revolutionary fought to extend citizenship and end slavery rather than to deny the former and extend the latter.

Second, domestic politics greatly influenced his positions. The Marshall Court’s extension of federal power stood in direct opposition to his own state’s rights beliefs. Though he privately claimed reservations about the institution of slavery, the growth of federal power superseded all other concerns, “he preferred to live, however, uncomfortably with slavery than under the tyranny of an all powerful federal government.” Third, the Missouri Compromise drove Jefferson to violate his own hopes for an agrarian yeoman tradition. Believing that abolitionists opposing the extension of slavery to the territories were poisoning “the minds of Northern people against Southerners as cruel, oppressive, unconscionable slave drivers”, Jefferson fought for slavery’s extension. In doing so he opened up western territories to large scale plantation farming, thus, making the acquisition of lands by small farmers more unlikely. If anything, he believed that allowing slavery’s diffusion throughout the territories would weaken its resolve. Moreover, Jefferson’s fear of race mixing “put himself in an anomalous and morally untenable position of advocating the opening of the West to black slaves and closing it to free blacks.” Here, Miller extends Davis’ contention that Jefferson held a deep prejudice against blacks. The presence of African Americans proved acceptable only when under the control of whites.

Finally, Miller’s work examines an area of Jefferson’s life that both Davis and Morgan excluded, Sally Hemmings. Miller does not assert that Jefferson engaged in a sexual relationship with Ms. Hemmings. Instead, Wolf by the Ears suggests that if he did not, it is likely that his nephews frequently indulged with Jefferson’s female slaves. Though accepted as fact today, at the time of Miller’s publication, questions regarding Jefferson’s sexual proclivities remained debatable.

Unlike Miller’s 1977 work, Gordon Wood’s The Radicalism of the American Revolution (1992) examines the American Revolution more broadly. Rejecting the Progressive belief that within pre-Revolutionary America existed significant class divisions, Wood argues that though the Revolution promoted radical ideas that greatly altered colonial society, these changes did not represent a revolutionary change. However, the forces over the course of the nineteenth century did. An interpretative work, Wood re-evaluates the scholarship of the last century concerning the Revolution and its meanings.

Under the monarchy, colonial America was a series of hierarchical relations, where everyone had superiors and inferiors. This hierarchy featured a system of dependency and social obligation. The weakness of the state along with its multiple forms resulted in a society in which a patron-client paternalistic dynamic developed between colonists. Traditional relationships of the period were of this nature. For “gentlemen”, reputation was of the upmost importance. If one failed to maintain his reputation or allowed others to disparage it, the individual might lose social and political authority. The weakness of the state expanded the power of such men since they were able to support others and in the thought of the day, provide an economy for locals through their consumption. Attached to these relationships were assumptions concerning various concepts such as equality, interest, and the idea of work.

Enlightenment ideas along with economic developments led to “immense changes occurring everywhere in … personal and social relationships – the loosening and severing of hierarchical ties of kinship and patronage that were carrying [citizens] into modernity.” A questioning of old dependencies emerged. While some did question slavery, others did not. Wood argues that though in the presence of slavery “all their high blown talk of liberty, makes [colonists] seem inconsistent and hypocritical … it is important the that Revolution suddenly and effectively ended the cultural climate that had allowed black slavery …. to exist … without serious challenge.” No longer would slavery persist as an accepted reality. While the old society had “many calibrations and degrees of unfreedoms”, in theory, the new Republican society promoted legal equality. In reality, many of the young revolutionaries hoped to exchange one set of dependencies (imperialism, client-patron) for another (Republicanism, master-slave, “aristocracy of merit”). The meaning of work changed. Work now meant more than survival. Now it represented wealth and prosperity. Competing with “free labor” came to mean something entirely different. As result, pro-slavery forces turned to “racial and anthropological” explanations to justify the enslavement of peoples. In this way, Wood argues “the Revolution in effect set in motion ideological and social forces that doomed the institution of slavery in the North and led … to the Civil War.” Davis’ work made a similar observation, “If the American Revolution could not solve the problem, it at least led to a perception of the problem.”

Though the Revolution reserved many of its freedoms for white men, it established a pattern by which other groups – most notably women and blacks – could attain their own. According to Wood, the rights enjoyed by white men eventually trickled down to the rest of society, “the principles of [white men’s] achievement made possible the eventual strivings of others … for their own freedom, independence, and prosperity.” Here Wood differs from Davis, Morgan, and Miller. Where Wood sees the foundation for future progress, the others see retrenchment. Moreover, Morgan argues that the Republicanism that Wood celebrates rested on the forced labor of slaves and the subordination of women.

Tracing the Civil War back to the ideological stew of the American Revolution, Wood suggests that by changing the meaning of work, the North and South found mutual understanding increasingly problematic. Idleness, once seen as the symbol of an individual’s superiority, developed a new pejorative connotation. The idle slave owner failed to command the respect of Northerners, “celebration of work and disparagement of idleness [made] the South with its leisured aristocracy supported by slavery seem even more anomalous than it had been at the time of Revolution, thus aggravating the growing sectional split.”

Like Davis and Miller’s embittered revolutionary, Gordon Wood’s Jefferson, found younger generations lamentable. The value of Wood’s work here revolves around his ability to describe the system of dependencies that made reputation such a concern for Jefferson. If he had once believed “science and enlightenment were everywhere pushing back the forces of ignorance, superstition, and darkness”, by the 1820s, Jefferson felt people “were not becoming more enlightened after all.” His support of states’ rights appeared to be “an embarrassing fire eating defense of the South.” Wood enriches historians understanding of Jefferson. Miller and Davis depict a disappointed revolutionary who fails to understand the generations after him or how he himself contributed to their development. Placing Jefferson in the world of obligations and dependencies he grew out of allows observers to see his generation as transitional. Despite espousing Republican ideals, most revolutionaries lacked egalitarian credentials. Many believed they deserved deference. Even Jefferson as Miller points out, concerned himself more deeply with books elites read than those consumed by the ordinary masses, “Jefferson was fare more concerned with what books were read by the intellectual elite than with the reading matter which found its way into the hands of the common people.” Jefferson and his fellow revolutionaries thought themselves the best arbiters of the country’s future. Though they supported legal equality for white men, they did not advocate social equality. The forces unleashed by the Revolution did. Economically caught between mercantilism and capitalism, the market revolution and rise of capitalism served to exaggerate this generational divide.

Returning to the serpentine Haitian Revolution, Laurent Dubois’ Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (2004) provides an interpretive history of the successful slave rebellion. Similar to Wood’s work, Dubois builds on recent works to reevaluate the meaning of the Haitian revolt. Dubios argues that ideas of liberty, fomented by the French Revolution, inspired free-coloreds and slaves alike. Nearly as complex as the French Revolution, the Haitian Revolution consisted of a dizzying array of alliances and betrayals. Race did not serve as the broad unifying factor one might expect. Instead, free coloreds, many of whom owned slaves themselves, actively discriminated against Haiti’s slave population. Divided by class Haiti’s free black population sought to establish their citizenship and equality at the expense of the enslaved. Even Toussaint L’Ouverture consistently abrogated the rights of former slaves by ordering them back to cultivation. L’Ouverture’s political and economic intrigue led him to adopt dictatorial methods that created a “society based on social hierarchy, forced labor, and violent repression.” By the time of his capture, Napoleon’s emissaries had enlisted the aid of blacks resentful of L’Ouverture’s actions.

Though Napoleon captured the French leader his attempts to regain the island failed. European intrigue greatly complicated matters. Spanish, British, and French governments all attempted to gain control over the island, issuing questionable promises of liberty to the island’s black population. Still, the idea of liberty held such potency that L’Ouverture himself, at various moments, had fought either for or with all three European powers. Even the United States involved itself in hopes of continuing trade with Haiti while weakening French power in the New World. Yet, Thomas Jefferson and others’ fears of slave revolt in their own nation, tempered U.S. policy. Unlike Miller, Dubois ascribes Jefferson greater political acumen. Where Miller suggests Jefferson reacted to Napoleon’s gambits, ultimately determining the Emperor’s intentions, Dubois projects a president more aware of political intrigue. Dubois’ Jefferson remained fully in control, “With his eyes on Louisiana, he was clearly interested in limiting French power … but he was also concerned with limiting the revolution’s impact in North America.” Clearly, Dubois shares Davis and Miller’s perception of Jefferson’s racial anti-pithy when he quotes President Jefferson’s hope to “contain this disease to the island.”

Black Jacobins and Avengers of the New World share several similarities. Each illustrates the class divisions that pervaded Haitian society. Both authors provide evidence of L’Ouverture’s deft grasp of international politics and economics. James and Dubois note the importance of the French Revolution in driving the revolution. However, differences exist as well. First, undoubtedly, James’ work reveals Marxist nationalist influences not present in Avengers. Second, James papers over some of L’Ouverture’s harsher methods making little mention of the resentment former slaves held at being forced back to work on their plantations. Third, Dubois’ work benefits from decades of work completed on slavery, emancipation, and western revolutions. Avengers clearly demonstrates the differences between sugar and coffee cultivation and the effects those differences had on slaves. The general spatial layout of Haiti appears with greater clarity. Finally, James wrote Black Jacobins utilizing archives and interviews from surviving witnesses and participants, additionally his strident tone sharply contrasts with Dubois. Black Jacobins called West Indian and African peoples to revolution and it reflects that perspective.

Finally, Cassandra Pybus’ Epic Journeys of Freedom: Runaway Slaves of the American Revolution and their Global Quest for Liberty (2006) explores the revolution and its ideas from the perspective of slaves. Pybus’ transnational work crosses four continents as freedmen and women attempted to establish communities in Nova Scotia, Sierra Leone, and Australia. Carefully reconstructing these slave narratives, Pybus utilized archives in Sydney Australia, London and Kew, England along with a source referred to as The Book of Negroes.

Pybus’ work presents the Revolution from black loyalists who were also former slaves; this is a perspective that reflects poorly on men such as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. British promises of freedom led many slaves to abandon their plantations and farms at great risk. Lord Dunmore’s proclamation “that freed “all indented Servants, Negroes, or others … that are able and willing to bear Arms. He made no distinction between Patriot or Loyalist property,” outraged colonists. Pybus’ contribution comes from the perspective of the slaves who escaped to Dunmore. Additionally, like Miller, Pybus explores the Dunmore proclamation to illustrate the concerns of colonial leaders. Washington and Jefferson react poorly to their abandonment by some of their slaves. Jefferson’s anger seethes to the extent that years later in negotiations with British officials over American debts, he used the appropriation of his former slaves as reasons for default. Jefferson returned to this argument on numerous occasions, “Several times he was to repeat this claim of thirty stolen slaves, even though he had lost eighteen at most. He estimated that the slave loss to Virginia in one year alone was thirty thousand, a number he seemed to have derived from adding zeros to his own spurious total.” Whether his indignation emanated from anger over lost profits, an excuse to avoid repaying debt or a wounded pride that could not admit his slaves desired freedom over his company remains difficult to determine. However, the incident proves Jefferson took the issue seriously enough that he incorporated into international negotiations.

In addition to undermining the American economy, these runaways also aided the British war effort by providing intelligence, artisanal work, and other sorts of labor. The Crown’s officials made great attempts to secure their safe passage from the colonies to England even violating the spirit of the Treaty of Paris. Though free upon their arrival in England, London drove many into abject poverty. Increased visibility among the English led officials and English abolitionists set up committees for their welfare. Eventually, a movement developed to send former slaves to establish Freetown, Sierra Leone. Alternately, several freedmen had ended up in prison, eventually becoming part of England’s plan to establish a penal colony in what would become modern day Australia. Pybus tracks both groups’ experiences.

The freedmen’s time in England provides Pybus an opportunity to explore differences in Atlantic world racial attitudes. According to Pybus, the presence of blacks did not alarm many English. Though some like slavery apologist Edward Long decried interracial marriage, “parish records and other sources reveal no stigma attached to black men in the late eighteenth century, at least among the poor … “ In post-revolutionary America, such relations were not acceptable. Moreover, British intellectuals fashioned a belief that slavery construed a fundamental difference between England and her former colonies, “As tension with the American colonies mounted, these men began to articulate their views about slavery that would distinguish the British from the slave owning American colonists.”

British abolitionists sympathized with the fate of indigent former slaves, a compassion that Davis and Morgan point out, they did not reserve for their own masses of poor. This sympathy fed the movement to establish colonies for blacks, most notably in Africa and Nova Scotia, Canada. In each setting, the freedmen and women were besieged by poor planning, hostile or ambivalent indigenous peoples, incompetent leadership, and harsh weather. Though each “colony” differed in its structure, former slaves often found themselves at odds with the leadership put into place by the British crown. Threats of starvation emerged regularly. In South Wales, the freedmen were treated harshly. Similarly in Freetown, religious differences and the arrogance of white leaders undermined intra-colonial relations such that the colony persisted in permanent conflict. Ultimately, the black settlers’ views on liberty were as radical as those of the American Revolution, leading English Abolitionist William Wilberforce view them like “Jacobins as if they had been trained and educated in Paris.” If a handful of freedmen and women did gain liberty, the vast majority did not.

In relation to Wolf by the Ears, the establishment of the Sierra Leone colony influenced Jefferson’s own beliefs concerning the repatriation of blacks. Despite his states’ rights beliefs, Jefferson believed it the duty of the federal government to establish colonies for freedmen and women. Distrustful or dubious of the success of private efforts, Jefferson never warmed to the American Colonization Society. Moreover, he advocated Haiti as a more suitable alternative, since “Haiti seemed to him to be a proper laboratory for settling the pragmatically the vexing question whether the apparent inferiority of blacks was innate or simply the result of servitude.” In alignment with his admittedly fluctuating political beliefs, Jefferson argued efforts to resolve the issue of slavery must come from the southern states themselves.

== Conclusion ==

Slavery and the impact of revolutionary ideology on the enslaved, colonists, and elites remains a topic for historical discussion. C.L.R. James initiated an early transnational model for exploration of these ideas. Black Jacobins examines events not only in Haiti but also France. The meaning of French black citizenship meant something very real to free blacks, free coloreds, and slaves. Dubois adds to this work by reinterpreting the revolution based on recent work in conjunction with James’ classic. Published nearly 70 years after Black Jacobins, Avengers of the New World and The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution’s fidelity to much of James’ observation serves as testament to the importance of his work. Davis’ work much more than the others provides a comparative examination of the American situation. Placing it within a broader context, Davis reveals the differing circumstances with which slavery contended. Traversing Europe and the Americas Davis’ approach enables readers to identify the peculiar characteristics of the American system. Edmund Morgan’s contribution explains how Virginia acted as a catalyst for large scale plantation slavery. The conditions of America’s oldest colony established a precedent to be followed by others. Moreover, Morgan illustrates the manner in which Republicanism moored itself to racial and gendered subservience. Racism emerged in order to justify such inequalities. John Chester Miller’s research provides historians with a nuanced study of one of the nation’s critical political thinkers. Tracing Jefferson’s beliefs on slavery conveys the complex, contradictory nature of the system and the political structure it supported. Jefferson’s vacillations and disappointments reflect those of a nation struggling to rectify an economic system that over time proved immoral and economically inefficient.

Gordon Wood’s examination of the revolution proposes a more positive interpretation than those of previous historians. For Wood and to a lesser extent Davis, the Revolution at least constructed a social/political reality in which slavery no longer existed without question. As Morgan also pointed out, slave owners became dependent on racist arguments to justify their use of bondage. Wood credits the revolution with creating the abolitionist movement, tying the revolution’s ideology with the eventual sectional split of the Civil War. Finally, Pybus’ truly transnational work provides historians with a new way of examining the American Revolution. Important for not only the voices it amplifies, but also for the direction in which it takes the field, Pybus’ work reframes the role of the// revolution in the Atlantic world. Increasingly, American history has been accused of parochial exceptionalism. Epic Journeys// like Davis’ 1975 work, provides historians with a new way of envisioning the Revolution’s meanings outside of a strictly American context.

''Ryan Reft''

== Bibliography ==

* Davis, David Brion, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, Cornell University Press: New York, 1975.
* Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution
* James, C.L.R., The Black Jacobins, New York: The Dial Press, 1938.
* Miller, John Chester, A Wolf by the Ears: Thomas Jefferson and Slavery, Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia.
* Morgan, Edmund, American Slavery, American Freedom, W.W. Norton and Company: New York, 1975.
* Pybus, Cansandra, Epic Journeys of Freedom: Runaway Slaves of the American Revolution and their Global Quest for Liberty, Beacon Press: Boston, 2006 Wood, Gordon, The Radicalism of the American Revolution, Vintage Books: NY.

Revolution and Slavery in the Atlantic World

2012-06-21T01:56:46Z

KevinBaker:

“The liberty and equality which these blacks acclaimed as they went into battle meant far more to them than the same words in the mouths of the French. And in a revolutionary struggle these things are worth many regiments.”

— C.L.R James, The Black Jacobins

“No Patriot leader had been more firmly persuaded than Jefferson of the moral superiority of Americans; and none was more astonished and chagrined when they revealed during the postwar period that they were not the paragons of patriotism, spartanism, rectitude he had supposed them to be.”

— John Chester Miller, A Wolf by the Ears

For all eighteenth century societies encountering the Enlightenment, a delicate balancing act unfolded. Thirty years after the battles of Lexington and Concord, America, France, and Haiti all had undergone revolution. Though each differed in context, the three revolutions drew upon the ideological ferment of the Enlightenment. Accordingly, the manner in which the Lockean and Rousseauan beliefs influenced revolutionaries differs. The presence of slavery in America and Haiti altered the trajectory of each revolution. If during the American Revolution, some revolutionaries like Thomas Jefferson questioned the legitimacy of human bondage, these questions faded in independence. In France, attitudes toward the Haitian Revolution fluctuated as well. In moments some French leaders called for emancipation while in others, they demanded the institution’s reestablishment. Across the Atlantic world, slaves, free blacks, and mulattoes (more so in Haiti then the former British colonies) absorbed the same ideologies as revolutionary leaders. The conflict between hopes for freedom among those enslaved, demands of liberty from those colonized, and the fears of those grasping at post revolutionary calm collided.

Historians often reflect the time period in which they write. C.L.R. James proves no exception. James’ The Black Jacobins represents a Marxist interpretation of the Haitian Revolution and its leaders. Published in 1938, James’ work exudes the same revolutionary spirit as his subjects, “Pericles on Democracy, Paine on the Rights of Man, the Declaration of Independence, the Communist Manifesto, these are some of the political documents which … have moved men and will always move them, for the writers …. strike chords and awaken aspirations that sleep in the hearts of the majority of every age.” Using archival sources and interviews from survivors, James provides a case study of the Haitian Revolution. Black Jacobins remains the standard by which all other accounts of the uprising are measured. Speaking to the colonized peoples of the Caribbean and Africa, the work promotes the Revolution’s successes while underlining its failures, “the blacks of Africa are more advanced, nearer ready than were the slaves of San Domingo”.

Black Jacobins begins in Haiti prior to the French Revolution. With an established Haitian race based class system, the island’s society rested on a complex collection of “small whites”, “great whites”, free blacks, mulattoes, and slaves. Additionally, the French colony remained divided between three differing economic regions the “maritime bourgeoisie” north, the less populous western region which featured a large mulatto population, and the southern province which more than the others, stands apart because of the vast majority of mulattoes present. When the French Revolution erupts, the north, west, and southern sections respond according to their own interests. The north, controlled by white merchants and lawyers, opposed the colonial administration believing its interference in their political and economic affairs retarded their growth. Promises of widespread liberties made many in the North anxious, while mulattos in the neighboring areas embraced France’s revolutionary fervor. Despite claims of freedom for themselves, propertied free blacks and mulattoes did not extend such promises to black slaves in Haiti. The revolving alliances that emerged reflect protection of these interests, all of which excluded Haiti’s slave population. While the mixed nature of mulattos left them alienated from all other groups, their prevalence made them a vital ally to both whites and blacks alike.

James gives credit to the events and ideals of the French Revolution for contributing to Haiti’s own uprising. For example, French attitudes toward Haiti’s planter class fluctuated. When the north’s “maritime bourgeoisie” appealed for British intervention, French perceptions of mulattoes and free blacks changed. Remaining loyal to France, French political leaders begin contemplating black citizenship. Revolutionary leaders, free blacks, mulattoes, and slaves all demanded the revolution’s promises of citizenship and freedom, while the vast majority of whites attempted to dampen such hopes. Juxtaposing the role of working class French citizens and black slaves in Haiti, James argues “it was the quarrel between bourgeoisie and monarchy that brought the Paris masses on the political stage. It was the quarrel between whites and Mulattoes that woke the sleeping slaves.”

A traditional Marxist, a class based interpretation of the revolution informs James’ view. While acknowledging the role of race, James clearly points to divisions that arise between free blacks and mulattoes and slaves. For James, property owners “are the most energetic flag wagers and patriots in every country, but only so long as they enjoy their possessions; to safe guard those they desert God, King and Country in a twinkling.” This did not exclude groups one might thought sensitive to revolutionary freedoms, “Mulatto proprietors … preferred their slaves to liberty and equality.”

Though James clearly credits Haitian slaves as the driving force behind their revolution, its leaders figure prominently. Obviously, no leader emerges as clearly as Toussaint L’Ouverture. Unlike the equivocating propertied classes, be they mulattoes, free blacks, or whites, L’Ouverture fully committed the revolution to the ideals put forth by the French, “Toussiant was whole man. The man into which the French Revolution had made him demanded that the relation with the France of liberty, equality, fraternity and the abolition of slavery without a debate should be maintained.” L’Ouverture continually maneuvered among the three European powers (France, Britain, and Spain) to ensure these rights. Acknowledging L’Ouverture’s political and economic wisdom, James also notes his inability to explain his decisions to followers and rivals. For example, the mulattoes of the west resented L’Ouverture’s reconciliation with former planters. Former slaves disliked his strict rule over their labor. Though committed to abolition, L’Ouverture believed Haiti needed to retain economic and political ties to France. L’Ouveture illustrated a nuanced grasp of Haiti’s complicated economic and political situation, but having never articulated such motives properly, they evaporated as the revolution unfolded. Dessalines lacked the grace and reserve of his superior, but he exhibited the necessary brutal exactitude to carry the revolution to its logical conclusion.

Almost 30 years later, David Brion Davis’ The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution 1770-1823 examined similar themes but from a comparative perspective. Focusing on the Atlantic world, Davis’s work explores the rise of abolitionism and its relation to capitalist forces (specifically the industrial revolution), religious ferment and ideological developments. Davis’ work also displays aspects of Marxist thought especially in regard to attitudes toward the English poor by abolitionists, “As reformers grappled with the problems of crime, pauperism, and labor discipline, they seemed to be unconsciously haunted by the image of the slave plantation.” Abolitionists ignored the “invisible chains being forged at home” but recoiled at those created by slavery. Unlike James who placed an inordinate amount of stress on propertied interests, Davis notes the intersection of ideology, religious beliefs, and economics, “[anti-slavery] ideology emerged from a convergence of complex religious, intellectual, and literary trends – trends which are by no means reducible to the economic interests of particular classes but which must be understood as part of a larger transformation in attitudes toward labor, property, and individual responsibility.” Yet if such changes created classes attracted to anti-slavery, economic processes also deepened American dependence on plantation slavery, “Slave grown cotton had become indispensable for the industrial development of Lancashire as well as New England. And if slave labor itself seemed repugnant to capitalist ideology, there was little ground for the hope that that the free play of market forces would soon undermine a supposedly wasteful, unproductive, and unprofitable system of labor.”

Davis’ comparative framework enables his work to explore ideological and economic conflicts that Black Jacobins stresses. Juxtaposing Lord Dunmore’s proclamation promising freedom to American slaves who took arms against the Patriots with Leger Felicite Sonthonax’s call to “rebellious slaves” in the countryside, Davis illustrates the contrasts of emancipation of the two revolutions. By Davis’ lights, Lord Dunmore’s proclamation failed, “Several hundred Negroes succeeded in joining Lord Dunmore’s small army, but their forays along the coast were generally unsuccessful.” Whereas Sonthonax’s rescued his forces due to “some ten thousand blacks [storming] down upon Le Cap, and it was the pro-planter governor, accompanied by most of the surviving white residents, who fled by the sea..” Using Black Jacobins description of the event, Davis compares the context in which each “call to arms” occurred, explaining the subsequent results.

Davis acknowledges the importance of the Haitian Revolution and its widespread effects on the Atlantic world. Still, he notes the unique social structure of the French colonies along with the influence of the French Revolution made analogies to the American South difficult. Pointing to the divided nature of the islands’ society, “the slogans of liberty, equality, and fraternity would have quite different meanings for these fragmented groups. And they would have meaning altogether different for the Negro slaves who listened to heated political discussion or who, in the person of Toussaint L’Ouverture, even pondered the stirring and inflammatory words of the Abbe Raynal.” With that said, Enlightenment ideals, grievances toward mercantilist policies, and resentment of European officials (as in the British colonies) fueled Haitian ideas concerning liberty.

If English abolitionism spread as result of several forces, why did efforts emanating from the American Revolution stall following the conflict’s conclusion? As Davis points out, few northern governments attempted to legislate abolition. In Massachusetts, where revolutionary ideals found some of their most militant expression before and during the fight for independence, “judicial decisions eroded the institution.” Religious movements like the Great Awakening encouraged anti-slavery beliefs even in parts of the South (though usually such regions featured a relative larger Quaker population) “Indigenous questioning” of slavery in the South failed to create an anti-slavery/pro-slavery binary. Instead, “it led to a resolution which channeled idealism toward the goals of Christian trusteeship … which committed the entire society to the moral defense of the slaveholder.”

Ideas of liberty and independence were not based on abstractions. Property ownership created the independence upon which many revolutionary ideals rested. Drawing from Edmund Morgan, Davis emphasizes that slavery freed the South from fear of a dangerous landless white underclass. American colonists “feared and mistrusted men, regardless of race, who lacked any tangible stake in society … it follows that eighteenth century southern leaders could promote the ideal of a free white yeomanry and profess allegiance to the rights of Englishmen precisely because black slaves had taken the place of lower cast whites.”

Following the American Revolution, political leadership on the issue of slavery faded. Thomas Jefferson’s evolving beliefs illustrate this collapse of political will. In his early years, Jefferson argued for the eventual emancipation of slaves, but also their deportation. Jefferson never viewed blacks as equals. Concerned with maintaining his reputation, from which his political power emanated, Jefferson exhibited an increasing reticence regarding slavery. In A Summary View of the Rights of British America, Jefferson abdicated American responsibility for the “peculiar institution’ blaming British imposition. In Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson criticizes the institution for its effects on Masters and their children. However, the passage of time dulled Jefferson’s enthusiasm. In addition, his own economic difficulties prohibited him from encouraging emancipation, “Jefferson was at this time in critical financial straits and was faced with the need of selling land or slaves … “ Even worse “when the chips were down, as in the Missouri crisis, he threw his weight behind slavery’s expansion, and bequeathed to the South the image of anti-slavery as a Federalist mask for political and economic exploitation.” In keeping with the comparative nature of his work, Davis discusses Jefferson in the context of his contemporaries Frenchman Moreau de Saint-Mery and Englishman Bryn Edwards. Though the two Europeans opposed the anti-slavery movement, they expressed a certain appreciation for blacks that eluded Jefferson, “one gets the distinct impression that both Moreau and Edwards actually liked blacks.” Thus, economic interest, political relevancy, and racism diminished Jefferson’s abolitionism.

Edmund Morgan’s 1975 work American Slavery, American Freedom explores the dynamics of pre-Revolutionary Virginia from its failed Roanoke colony to the eve of revolution. Unlike Davis’ work, Morgan confines his focus to Virginia’s pre-revolutionary existence. Moreover, American Slavery, American Freedom establishes the trajectory of slavery’s establishment in America’s oldest colony. As mortality rates declined, English immigration diminished, competition with sugar plantations in the West Indies receded, Jamestown delayed the adoption of slavery. Rather than an inevitability, slavery emerged out of a complex set of circumstances and practices which developed in seventeenth century Virginia.

Morgan’s work illustrates the impact of changing demographics, economics, and social/political structures that shaped the colony’s eventual adoption of slavery. Early colonists to Jamestown consisted of primarily gentlemen and indentured servants. Land existed in great abundance but workers did not. The development of tobacco as a viable means of support increased the colony’s dependence on indentured servants. Excessively harsh treatment of the indentured became common in Jamestown society. The behavior of masters toward their servants, established a precedent of severity that was later easily extended to slaves. Additionally, before the adoption of slavery, Virginian planters had created a system of plantation labor, thus, allowing for a smooth transition to large scale plantation bondage.

By the late seventeenth century, growing numbers of former servants, spatial growth, and the presence of Native Americans constricted the population. Landless whites accumulated. Bacon’s Rebellion erupted when the landless masses demanded the colonial government abrogate its agreements with the surrounding tribes so that new land could be settled. Land remained necessary not only for subsistence but man’s freedom, “Men who labored on their own land grew not only food but independence. No would be tyrant could starve them into submission or win their vote with paltry promises.” As acknowledged by Davis, Morgan emphasizes the importance of slavery as a means to extend Republican ideals. The system of slavery served as a leveler for Virginian society. All white men by dint of their skin color could claim some notion of equality. In addition, having solved their labor problems, many average whites could attain land, “during the colonial period there were enough [men] who did own land to make Virginia, in the eyes of Virginians at least, a land to fit the picture in republican textbooks.”

Both Davis and Morgan note “the seventeenth century had seen the simultaneous rise of republican thinking and of that contempt for the poor.” This same fear of masses of indigents, fed Jefferson’s fear of a manufacturing society. For large scale manufacturers produced a dehumanized landless poor. As part of justification for slavery, racism developed. Prior to the establishment of slavery in Virginia, black indentured servants frequently labored with their white counterparts. However, slavery required an explanation. The hostility expressed for decades toward Native Americans transferred to blacks. The simultaneous degradation of the poor made this even easier, “Racism thus absorbed in Virginia the fear and contempt that men in England … felt for the inarticulate lower classes. Racism made it possible for white Virginians to develop a devotion to the equality that English republicans had declared the soul of liberty.” Furthermore, racism enabled Virginians to lump “Indians, mulattoes, and Indians in a single pariah class”. Free individuals from these groups clung “to their freedom. But it was made plain to them and to the white population that their color rendered freedom in appropriate for them … they were denied the right to vote or hold office or to testify in court proceedings.” By the same logic, “Virginians had paved the way for a similar lumping of small and large planters in a single master class.” Morgan, as others after him, identifies the foundation upon which Virginian Republicanism rested on “their power over the men and women they held in bondage.”

According to Morgan, “the most ardent American republicans were Virginians … “ If true, John Chester Miller’s The Wolf by the Ears: Thomas Jefferson and Slavery explores Virginia’s most famous Republican and his elusive positions on slavery. Published two years after American Slavery, American Freedom, Miller focuses exclusively on the sage of Monticello. As Davis noted, Jefferson’s views on slavery as a young man contrasted markedly with those he held later in life. Jefferson’s// A Summary View of the Rights of British America// blamed George the III for “foisting slavery upon the American people.” Favoring gradual abolition and subsequent deportation, Jefferson made efforts to reduce slavery in his home state. His apparent fear and loathing of racial mixture contributed to this position. If Davis describes the Lord Dunmore episode in order to illustrate the stark differences between two Atlantic world revolutions, Miller explores Jefferson’s manipulation of the incident for different ends. Miller’s work uses the episode to illustrate the contradictions present in even the more strident youthful anti-slavery Jefferson. Accusing England of fomenting “racial, servile war,” the Declaration of Independence “asserts the right of white Americans to rebel against attempts to reduce them to slavery” but denies inferentially, in the context of the events of 1775-1776, the right of black slaves to rebel against their masters in order to attain their freedom”

For Jefferson, history amounted to a linear line of progress. If slavery were not abolished in his generation, subsequent generations would. The abolition of Virginia’s slave trade in 1778 serves as one example. If civilization moved according to his beliefs complete abolition would arrive soon. Yet, the same process that abolished the slave trade in Virginia also tightened rules for slavery. Like Davis and Morgan, Miller refers to Jefferson’s comments in Notes on the State of Virginia. In contrast, Miller examines the motivations for his prejudice toward blacks, “Jefferson was under powerful psychological compulsion to believe that the blacks were innately inferior. Had he thought that he and his fellow Virginians were keeping in subjugation and debasement thousands of potential poets, philosophers, scientists, and men of letters … he could not have endured the … the continued existence of slavery.” In this way, he could justify his own participation in the institution. However, by doing so, Jefferson greatly undermined his own appeal for their emancipation. Perhaps more importantly, the “rebuffs” Jefferson experienced in regard to his appeals, led him to abandon any public “effort to abolish slavery in Virginia.” Advocating for abolition weakened his own political standing among many of his fellow Virginians, which in turn made his attempts less likely to succeed. As a gradualist, Jefferson believed his generation had done all it could, the remaining work must be done by those that followed.

Ideals for any political leader do not exist in a vacuum. Circumstance and time function to alter perceptions. Miller traces these developments in Jefferson’s thought. Several historical developments affected Jefferson’s views on slavery. First, the Haitian Revolution alarmed President Jefferson. He fully believed, that “black crews and supercargoes from St. Domingo would soon be at work spreading subversive notions among American slaves.” Fearing widespread racial conflict, Jefferson hoped to “emancipate and deport black slaves without delay… “ His fears subsided, as political maneuvering between France and the US led to the Louisiana Purchase. Still, Jefferson clung to the new belief that Haiti would be the perfect destination for future emancipated slaves. C.L.R James makes little mention of U.S. interests, only that they impeded efforts by Haitian Revolutionaries. However, James’ L’Ouverture exhibits a similar political flexibility. Adjusting to the shifting winds of the French Revolution, L’Ouverture in some moments fought for King and country and in others for Republicanism. In accordance, L’Ouverture maneuvered among alliances with European powers. Of course, he did so out of necessity. Moreover, the Haitian revolutionary fought to extend citizenship and end slavery rather than to deny the former and extend the latter.

Second, domestic politics greatly influenced his positions. The Marshall Court’s extension of federal power stood in direct opposition to his own state’s rights beliefs. Though he privately claimed reservations about the institution of slavery, the growth of federal power superseded all other concerns, “he preferred to live, however, uncomfortably with slavery than under the tyranny of an all powerful federal government.” Third, the Missouri Compromise drove Jefferson to violate his own hopes for an agrarian yeoman tradition. Believing that abolitionists opposing the extension of slavery to the territories were poisoning “the minds of Northern people against Southerners as cruel, oppressive, unconscionable slave drivers”, Jefferson fought for slavery’s extension. In doing so he opened up western territories to large scale plantation farming, thus, making the acquisition of lands by small farmers more unlikely. If anything, he believed that allowing slavery’s diffusion throughout the territories would weaken its resolve. Moreover, Jefferson’s fear of race mixing “put himself in an anomalous and morally untenable position of advocating the opening of the West to black slaves and closing it to free blacks.” Here, Miller extends Davis’ contention that Jefferson held a deep prejudice against blacks. The presence of African Americans proved acceptable only when under the control of whites.

Finally, Miller’s work examines an area of Jefferson’s life that both Davis and Morgan excluded, Sally Hemmings. Miller does not assert that Jefferson engaged in a sexual relationship with Ms. Hemmings. Instead, Wolf by the Ears suggests that if he did not, it is likely that his nephews frequently indulged with Jefferson’s female slaves. Though accepted as fact today, at the time of Miller’s publication, questions regarding Jefferson’s sexual proclivities remained debatable.

Unlike Miller’s 1977 work, Gordon Wood’s The Radicalism of the American Revolution (1992) examines the American Revolution more broadly. Rejecting the Progressive belief that within pre-Revolutionary America existed significant class divisions, Wood argues that though the Revolution promoted radical ideas that greatly altered colonial society, these changes did not represent a revolutionary change. However, the forces over the course of the nineteenth century did. An interpretative work, Wood re-evaluates the scholarship of the last century concerning the Revolution and its meanings.

Under the monarchy, colonial America was a series of hierarchical relations, where everyone had superiors and inferiors. This hierarchy featured a system of dependency and social obligation. The weakness of the state along with its multiple forms resulted in a society in which a patron-client paternalistic dynamic developed between colonists. Traditional relationships of the period were of this nature. For “gentlemen”, reputation was of the upmost importance. If one failed to maintain his reputation or allowed others to disparage it, the individual might lose social and political authority. The weakness of the state expanded the power of such men since they were able to support others and in the thought of the day, provide an economy for locals through their consumption. Attached to these relationships were assumptions concerning various concepts such as equality, interest, and the idea of work.

Enlightenment ideas along with economic developments led to “immense changes occurring everywhere in … personal and social relationships – the loosening and severing of hierarchical ties of kinship and patronage that were carrying [citizens] into modernity.” A questioning of old dependencies emerged. While some did question slavery, others did not. Wood argues that though in the presence of slavery “all their high blown talk of liberty, makes [colonists] seem inconsistent and hypocritical … it is important the that Revolution suddenly and effectively ended the cultural climate that had allowed black slavery …. to exist … without serious challenge.” No longer would slavery persist as an accepted reality. While the old society had “many calibrations and degrees of unfreedoms”, in theory, the new Republican society promoted legal equality. In reality, many of the young revolutionaries hoped to exchange one set of dependencies (imperialism, client-patron) for another (Republicanism, master-slave, “aristocracy of merit”). The meaning of work changed. Work now meant more than survival. Now it represented wealth and prosperity. Competing with “free labor” came to mean something entirely different. As result, pro-slavery forces turned to “racial and anthropological” explanations to justify the enslavement of peoples. In this way, Wood argues “the Revolution in effect set in motion ideological and social forces that doomed the institution of slavery in the North and led … to the Civil War.” Davis’ work made a similar observation, “If the American Revolution could not solve the problem, it at least led to a perception of the problem.”

Though the Revolution reserved many of its freedoms for white men, it established a pattern by which other groups – most notably women and blacks – could attain their own. According to Wood, the rights enjoyed by white men eventually trickled down to the rest of society, “the principles of [white men’s] achievement made possible the eventual strivings of others … for their own freedom, independence, and prosperity.” Here Wood differs from Davis, Morgan, and Miller. Where Wood sees the foundation for future progress, the others see retrenchment. Moreover, Morgan argues that the Republicanism that Wood celebrates rested on the forced labor of slaves and the subordination of women.

Tracing the Civil War back to the ideological stew of the American Revolution, Wood suggests that by changing the meaning of work, the North and South found mutual understanding increasingly problematic. Idleness, once seen as the symbol of an individual’s superiority, developed a new pejorative connotation. The idle slave owner failed to command the respect of Northerners, “celebration of work and disparagement of idleness [made] the South with its leisured aristocracy supported by slavery seem even more anomalous than it had been at the time of Revolution, thus aggravating the growing sectional split.”

Like Davis and Miller’s embittered revolutionary, Gordon Wood’s Jefferson, found younger generations lamentable. The value of Wood’s work here revolves around his ability to describe the system of dependencies that made reputation such a concern for Jefferson. If he had once believed “science and enlightenment were everywhere pushing back the forces of ignorance, superstition, and darkness”, by the 1820s, Jefferson felt people “were not becoming more enlightened after all.” His support of states’ rights appeared to be “an embarrassing fire eating defense of the South.” Wood enriches historians understanding of Jefferson. Miller and Davis depict a disappointed revolutionary who fails to understand the generations after him or how he himself contributed to their development. Placing Jefferson in the world of obligations and dependencies he grew out of allows observers to see his generation as transitional. Despite espousing Republican ideals, most revolutionaries lacked egalitarian credentials. Many believed they deserved deference. Even Jefferson as Miller points out, concerned himself more deeply with books elites read than those consumed by the ordinary masses, “Jefferson was fare more concerned with what books were read by the intellectual elite than with the reading matter which found its way into the hands of the common people.” Jefferson and his fellow revolutionaries thought themselves the best arbiters of the country’s future. Though they supported legal equality for white men, they did not advocate social equality. The forces unleashed by the Revolution did. Economically caught between mercantilism and capitalism, the market revolution and rise of capitalism served to exaggerate this generational divide.

Returning to the serpentine Haitian Revolution, Laurent Dubois’ Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (2004) provides an interpretive history of the successful slave rebellion. Similar to Wood’s work, Dubois builds on recent works to reevaluate the meaning of the Haitian revolt. Dubios argues that ideas of liberty, fomented by the French Revolution, inspired free-coloreds and slaves alike. Nearly as complex as the French Revolution, the Haitian Revolution consisted of a dizzying array of alliances and betrayals. Race did not serve as the broad unifying factor one might expect. Instead, free coloreds, many of whom owned slaves themselves, actively discriminated against Haiti’s slave population. Divided by class Haiti’s free black population sought to establish their citizenship and equality at the expense of the enslaved. Even Toussaint L’Ouverture consistently abrogated the rights of former slaves by ordering them back to cultivation. L’Ouverture’s political and economic intrigue led him to adopt dictatorial methods that created a “society based on social hierarchy, forced labor, and violent repression.” By the time of his capture, Napoleon’s emissaries had enlisted the aid of blacks resentful of L’Ouverture’s actions.

Though Napoleon captured the French leader his attempts to regain the island failed. European intrigue greatly complicated matters. Spanish, British, and French governments all attempted to gain control over the island, issuing questionable promises of liberty to the island’s black population. Still, the idea of liberty held such potency that L’Ouverture himself, at various moments, had fought either for or with all three European powers. Even the United States involved itself in hopes of continuing trade with Haiti while weakening French power in the New World. Yet, Thomas Jefferson and others’ fears of slave revolt in their own nation, tempered U.S. policy. Unlike Miller, Dubois ascribes Jefferson greater political acumen. Where Miller suggests Jefferson reacted to Napoleon’s gambits, ultimately determining the Emperor’s intentions, Dubois projects a president more aware of political intrigue. Dubois’ Jefferson remained fully in control, “With his eyes on Louisiana, he was clearly interested in limiting French power … but he was also concerned with limiting the revolution’s impact in North America.” Clearly, Dubois shares Davis and Miller’s perception of Jefferson’s racial anti-pithy when he quotes President Jefferson’s hope to “contain this disease to the island.”

Black Jacobins and Avengers of the New World share several similarities. Each illustrates the class divisions that pervaded Haitian society. Both authors provide evidence of L’Ouverture’s deft grasp of international politics and economics. James and Dubois note the importance of the French Revolution in driving the revolution. However, differences exist as well. First, undoubtedly, James’ work reveals Marxist nationalist influences not present in Avengers. Second, James papers over some of L’Ouverture’s harsher methods making little mention of the resentment former slaves held at being forced back to work on their plantations. Third, Dubois’ work benefits from decades of work completed on slavery, emancipation, and western revolutions. Avengers clearly demonstrates the differences between sugar and coffee cultivation and the effects those differences had on slaves. The general spatial layout of Haiti appears with greater clarity. Finally, James wrote Black Jacobins utilizing archives and interviews from surviving witnesses and participants, additionally his strident tone sharply contrasts with Dubois. Black Jacobins called West Indian and African peoples to revolution and it reflects that perspective.

Finally, Cassandra Pybus’ Epic Journeys of Freedom: Runaway Slaves of the American Revolution and their Global Quest for Liberty (2006) explores the revolution and its ideas from the perspective of slaves. Pybus’ transnational work crosses four continents as freedmen and women attempted to establish communities in Nova Scotia, Sierra Leone, and Australia. Carefully reconstructing these slave narratives, Pybus utilized archives in Sydney Australia, London and Kew, England along with a source referred to as The Book of Negroes.

Pybus’ work presents the Revolution from black loyalists who were also former slaves; this is a perspective that reflects poorly on men such as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. British promises of freedom led many slaves to abandon their plantations and farms at great risk. Lord Dunmore’s proclamation “that freed “all indented Servants, Negroes, or others … that are able and willing to bear Arms. He made no distinction between Patriot or Loyalist property,” outraged colonists. Pybus’ contribution comes from the perspective of the slaves who escaped to Dunmore. Additionally, like Miller, Pybus explores the Dunmore proclamation to illustrate the concerns of colonial leaders. Washington and Jefferson react poorly to their abandonment by some of their slaves. Jefferson’s anger seethes to the extent that years later in negotiations with British officials over American debts, he used the appropriation of his former slaves as reasons for default. Jefferson returned to this argument on numerous occasions, “Several times he was to repeat this claim of thirty stolen slaves, even though he had lost eighteen at most. He estimated that the slave loss to Virginia in one year alone was thirty thousand, a number he seemed to have derived from adding zeros to his own spurious total.” Whether his indignation emanated from anger over lost profits, an excuse to avoid repaying debt or a wounded pride that could not admit his slaves desired freedom over his company remains difficult to determine. However, the incident proves Jefferson took the issue seriously enough that he incorporated into international negotiations.

In addition to undermining the American economy, these runaways also aided the British war effort by providing intelligence, artisanal work, and other sorts of labor. The Crown’s officials made great attempts to secure their safe passage from the colonies to England even violating the spirit of the Treaty of Paris. Though free upon their arrival in England, London drove many into abject poverty. Increased visibility among the English led officials and English abolitionists set up committees for their welfare. Eventually, a movement developed to send former slaves to establish Freetown, Sierra Leone. Alternately, several freedmen had ended up in prison, eventually becoming part of England’s plan to establish a penal colony in what would become modern day Australia. Pybus tracks both groups’ experiences.

The freedmen’s time in England provides Pybus an opportunity to explore differences in Atlantic world racial attitudes. According to Pybus, the presence of blacks did not alarm many English. Though some like slavery apologist Edward Long decried interracial marriage, “parish records and other sources reveal no stigma attached to black men in the late eighteenth century, at least among the poor … “ In post-revolutionary America, such relations were not acceptable. Moreover, British intellectuals fashioned a belief that slavery construed a fundamental difference between England and her former colonies, “As tension with the American colonies mounted, these men began to articulate their views about slavery that would distinguish the British from the slave owning American colonists.”

British abolitionists sympathized with the fate of indigent former slaves, a compassion that Davis and Morgan point out, they did not reserve for their own masses of poor. This sympathy fed the movement to establish colonies for blacks, most notably in Africa and Nova Scotia, Canada. In each setting, the freedmen and women were besieged by poor planning, hostile or ambivalent indigenous peoples, incompetent leadership, and harsh weather. Though each “colony” differed in its structure, former slaves often found themselves at odds with the leadership put into place by the British crown. Threats of starvation emerged regularly. In South Wales, the freedmen were treated harshly. Similarly in Freetown, religious differences and the arrogance of white leaders undermined intra-colonial relations such that the colony persisted in permanent conflict. Ultimately, the black settlers’ views on liberty were as radical as those of the American Revolution, leading English Abolitionist William Wilberforce view them like “Jacobins as if they had been trained and educated in Paris.” If a handful of freedmen and women did gain liberty, the vast majority did not.

In relation to Wolf by the Ears, the establishment of the Sierra Leone colony influenced Jefferson’s own beliefs concerning the repatriation of blacks. Despite his states’ rights beliefs, Jefferson believed it the duty of the federal government to establish colonies for freedmen and women. Distrustful or dubious of the success of private efforts, Jefferson never warmed to the American Colonization Society. Moreover, he advocated Haiti as a more suitable alternative, since “Haiti seemed to him to be a proper laboratory for settling the pragmatically the vexing question whether the apparent inferiority of blacks was innate or simply the result of servitude.” In alignment with his admittedly fluctuating political beliefs, Jefferson argued efforts to resolve the issue of slavery must come from the southern states themselves.

== Conclusion ==

Slavery and the impact of revolutionary ideology on the enslaved, colonists, and elites remains a topic for historical discussion. C.L.R. James initiated an early transnational model for exploration of these ideas. Black Jacobins examines events not only in Haiti but also France. The meaning of French black citizenship meant something very real to free blacks, free coloreds, and slaves. Dubois adds to this work by reinterpreting the revolution based on recent work in conjunction with James’ classic. Published nearly 70 years after Black Jacobins, Avengers of the New World and The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution’s fidelity to much of James’ observation serves as testament to the importance of his work. Davis’ work much more than the others provides a comparative examination of the American situation. Placing it within a broader context, Davis reveals the differing circumstances with which slavery contended. Traversing Europe and the Americas Davis’ approach enables readers to identify the peculiar characteristics of the American system. Edmund Morgan’s contribution explains how Virginia acted as a catalyst for large scale plantation slavery. The conditions of America’s oldest colony established a precedent to be followed by others. Moreover, Morgan illustrates the manner in which Republicanism moored itself to racial and gendered subservience. Racism emerged in order to justify such inequalities. John Chester Miller’s research provides historians with a nuanced study of one of the nation’s critical political thinkers. Tracing Jefferson’s beliefs on slavery conveys the complex, contradictory nature of the system and the political structure it supported. Jefferson’s vacillations and disappointments reflect those of a nation struggling to rectify an economic system that over time proved immoral and economically inefficient.

Gordon Wood’s examination of the revolution proposes a more positive interpretation than those of previous historians. For Wood and to a lesser extent Davis, the Revolution at least constructed a social/political reality in which slavery no longer existed without question. As Morgan also pointed out, slave owners became dependent on racist arguments to justify their use of bondage. Wood credits the revolution with creating the abolitionist movement, tying the revolution’s ideology with the eventual sectional split of the Civil War. Finally, Pybus’ truly transnational work provides historians with a new way of examining the American Revolution. Important for not only the voices it amplifies, but also for the direction in which it takes the field, Pybus’ work reframes the role of the// revolution in the Atlantic world. Increasingly, American history has been accused of parochial exceptionalism. Epic Journeys// like Davis’ 1975 work, provides historians with a new way of envisioning the Revolution’s meanings outside of a strictly American context.

Ryan Reft

== Bibliography ==

* Davis, David Brion, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, Cornell University Press: New York, 1975.
* Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution
* James, C.L.R., The Black Jacobins, New York: The Dial Press, 1938.
* Miller, John Chester, A Wolf by the Ears: Thomas Jefferson and Slavery, Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia.
* Morgan, Edmund, American Slavery, American Freedom, W.W. Norton and Company: New York, 1975.
* Pybus, Cansandra, Epic Journeys of Freedom: Runaway Slaves of the American Revolution and their Global Quest for Liberty, Beacon Press: Boston, 2006 Wood, Gordon, The Radicalism of the American Revolution, Vintage Books: NY.

The Theoretical Foundations of Transnationalism: A Primer

2012-06-21T01:54:48Z

KevinBaker:

Though certainly not a recent invention, the proliferation of transnational histories over the past two decades successfully shifted scholars’ historical gaze to new concepts of membership, the impact of quickly disseminated technologies, the transformation of local, national, and international economics, and melting of traditional nation-state centered frames. Like other moments in historiography, the “transnational turn” as Micol Siegel labels it, illustrates the influences of the period. Increased flows of labor and goods ignorant of national borders, images shot across continents and oceans tying diasporas more closely to their place of origin despite distances of thousands of miles separating the two, or the undeniable influence of, not necessarily new but more powerful, multinationals. All these factors and more serve to alter not only historians’ view of history, but suggest several points of inquiry. Of these numerous questions, four serve as this paper’s central focus. How have historians accounted for the nation-state and its interplay with the mass migrations and technological innovations of the 20th and 21st century? What are the new economic structures and flows that underwrite the transnational approach and what are their attendant meanings for historical actors and scholars alike? How has transnationalism affected perceptions of space, time and movement? What has this all meant for historians sense of self and their work?

== I. The Nation-State, Borders, and Race ==

In his article, “But a Local Phase of a World Problem: Black History’s Global Vision, 1883-1950”, Robin D.G. Kelley explored the various ways African, Caribbean/West Indian, and African American scholars long embraced the transnational approach to history. Longstanding diasporas of black communities created through forced labor, slavery, migration and imperialism served to create a world in which black writers sought to circumvent national borders. How much of this is due to past discrimination and second class citizenship serves as a point of debate within Kelley’s piece, however it reveals an important point: American historians attentions to transnationalism have arrived rather late in the day.

Several years before Kelley’s article, Marxist historian Eric Hobsbaum explored the meaning of nationalism and the nation-state in Nations and Nationalism Since 1780: Programme, Myth, and Reality. Relying heavily on Bendict Anderson’s Imagined Communities, Hobsbaum argues that the standard solidarities based on language, ethnicity, and religion developed only recently as constructs accelerated by post 1880s processes such as Wilson’s declaration of self determination, the decline of imperial empires, and the harsh formation of nation-states out of colonialism’s decline. The “new nationalism” which surfaced illustrated marked differences from earlier variants. First, it abandoned the threshold principle, meaning smaller nation-states proved viable politically. Second, ethnicity/language became central, whereas previously each might account for some stratification internally, both failed to mobilize large numbers of peoples. Third, a political shift rightwards emphasized nation and flag, punishing internal minorities whom might not fit constructed national ideals. As nations grew and economies expanded numerous ethnic groups made choices about which language they chose to identify with for several reasons but significant among them economic and social benefits (i.e. Poles that chose to speak German etc.) National consciousness did develop, however it grew as did numerous other forms of consciousness.

Hobsbawm and Anderson’s questioning of the nation-states “inherent presence” serves as two of the earlier academic salvos aimed at deconstructing national oriented research. The rise of electronic media, global migrations of peoples, diverse financial systems and tools, along with other developing factors have led numerous others to openly question the efficacy of the nation state. Multivalent consciousness, the kind Hobsbawm hints at, emerges as a key pivot for anthropologist Arjun Appadurai in his work Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. For Appadurai, globalization fundamentally changed the flow of capital, peoples, and images. Technology allows for new diasporic connections, ones that allow peoples to remain more closely connected than ever to their origins. This new spatialization or what the author categorizes as deterritorialization combined with the rise of electronic media contributes to the unmooring of the nation-state from traditionally defined nation based identities. Moreover, the process of globalization fetishizes localities as “the globally dispersed forces that actually drive the production process.” Appadurai cautions anthropologists, sociologists and historians to avoid imposing western historical models of capital development or democracy, noting that these new developments requires more flexible and insightful analysis, since the growth of such concepts need not occur identically to European or American examples

George Lipsitz agrees with Appadurai’s “deterritorialization” arguing that connections between cultures and places once intertwined with industrial area political and cultural practices lack the pervasiveness of past iterations. Regarding culture, Lipsitz advises a new and different imagination. In Modernity at Large, Appadurai constructs a theoretical apparatus made up of five distinctive “cultural flows” consisting of of ethnoscapes, mediascapes, financescapes, ideoscapes, and technoscapes. Appadurai suggests that though at times in agreement, these “scapes” frequently relate to one another disjunctively. People’s, nation-states, and others marshall public spheres and counterpublics to reimagine their own organizational or ethnic identities or as the author notes, they create “scripts” that allow for “imagined worlds” which may apply to their own existence or “those of others living in other places”. Lipsitz concurs even quoting Appadurai but taking issue with his underestimation of the continuing power of “local spaces memories and practices, [moreover] his framework does not adequately account for the degree of oppressive centralized power basic to the creation of these new spaces” . Still, Lipsitz certainly agrees with the need for the field of American Studies to engage with “global popular culture”, “We are witnessing an inversion of prestige, a moment when diasporic, nomadic, and fugitive slave cultures from the margins seem to speak more powerfully to present conditions than do metropolitan cultures committed to the congruence of culture culture and place.” Again like Appadurai, Lispitz calls for imagination in realizing the new identities, memberships, and perspectives emerging from the vast migrations of capital, peoples, and technologies.

The expectation of new economic, social, or political developments unfolding in European or Western traditions disrupted the production of credible history. The imposition of one region’s history of development on another resulted in ethnocentric, racially infected, muddled historical understandings. Critically, the construction of discourse plays a role in spreading these flawed understandings. In relation, Stuart Hall traces the creation of a Western European discourse toward the “other”. Borrowing from Edward Said and Michele Foucault, Hall illustrates how Foucault’s ideas regarding discourse and “truth regimes” which Said rightly pointed out constructed an “Orientalism” that fetishized non-western peoples (inscribing on them the difference of inferiority). As Hall notes, the differences Europeans utilized to separate themselves from non-white peoples, often grossly misinterpreted native civilizations as simple or backwards, ignoring the complex social, political and economic structures which served as the foundations of indigenous civilizations. The failure of Europeans to consider an alternate way of producing markets, civil society and government led them to consider such differences as signs of primitiveness. The pervasiveness of such discourse infected the work of even the most visionary theorists, most notably Marx and Weber, who embraced many of the linear progressive assumptions of “The West and the Rest” trope. If Hobsbawm suggests religion as a national organizing principle in the late and early twentieth century remains problematic, Hall argues that in earlier eras the unifying force of Christiandom provided a “co-identity” in which “Europe’s Christian identity – what made its civilization distinct and unique – was in its first instance, essentially religious and Christian.” Only later did Europe develop its geographical, political, and economic identity. Moreover, Hall agrees with Said that the West’s construction of “the Rest” reveals as much about itself as its discourse of the other. Without “the Rest”, the West loses its meaning, a relational identity obscured by its emphasis on perceived difference.

Michele Foucault traces this use of difference from the Classical Age of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries to its transformation due to Enlightenment influences in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. According to Foucault, the “Classical Age” created a table or picture based on the representations of three fields: natural history, language, and biology. Between them they establish a sort of matrix upon which knowledge of the age rested, “The nature of things, their coexistence, the way in which they are linked together and communicate is nothing other than their resemblance. And that resemblance is visible only in the network of signs that crossed the world from one end to the other.” With the closing decades of the eighteenth century came change. Discontinuities arose. The table no longer sufficed as “the general area of knowledge is no longer that of identities and differences, that of non-quantitative orders, that of a universal characterization, of a general taxinomnia, of a non-measurable mathesis, but an area made up of organic structures, that is, of internal relations between elements whose totality performs a function… these organic structures are discontinuous … they do not form a table of unbroken simultaneities, but that certain of them are on the same level whereas others form series or linear sequences.” In this way, analogy and succession become the hallmarks of ordering various “empiricities”. From the 1800s on, history “deployed … the analogies that connect distinct organic structures to one another. “ Of course, Foucault’s history places laws on the “analysis of production, the analysis of organically structured beings, and lastly, on the analysis of linguistic groups. History gives place to analogical organic structures, just as Order opened the way to successive identities and differences.”

As Hall works illustrates not only Foucault’s thoughts have impacted transnational orientations. Edward Said’s Orientalism greatly influenced a generation of academics. In Orientalism, Said took Western historians and academics to task for constructing an essentialized view of the Asian and the Middle East which revealed as much about Western culture than those outside of Europe and the Americas. Traversing similar terrain, Said’s Culture and Imperialism explores the role of “culture” in the imperial project and culture’s connections globally, illustrating a clear influence on the thought of Stuart Hall and several other writers of transnational histories. Focusing on the Western Empires of the nineteenth and twentieth century and their cultural productions , Said notes that too few scholars have paid close attention to “the privileged role of culture in the modern imperial experience” noting that its “global reach” continues to “cast a shadow over our own times.”

Much like Arjun Appadurai , Said attempts to illuminate obscured relationships between imperialism and its colonies taking note of imperialism’s obscured presence in the domestic culture of imperializing nations. Said’s literary examples include Thomas Hardy, Albert Camus, and Chalers Dickens among others. Utilizing examples such as Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, Said illustrates the implicit connections between European protagonists and Europe itself to Asia , Middle East, and the Caribbean. For example, Jane Austen’s protagonists depends on Antigua for their economic livelihood, a dependency often presented by the text as peripheral. As evidence of Hall’s “noble savage” argument, Said notes that Heart of Darkness' Marlowe simultaneously reinforces ideas about non whites and Africa while also expressing a deep skepticism about the project of imperialism itself. Said suggests that the “great texts” of European and American culture must be reexamined such that scholars “give emphasis and voice to what is silent or marginally represented.” In addition, Accordingly, the metropole/periphery formation cast subjectivities on the Middle East and Asia as well as other realms of empire, as places younger Europeans went to “sow their oats”, a wild adventure among irrational non-western peoples. Again, one finds the root of similar observations which Hall puts forth.

If Culture and Imperialism’s first half resonates with critiques by Stuart Hall, its latter portion clearly influenced Micol Siegel’s “Beyond Comparison: Comparative Method after the Transnational Turn.” Siegel explores the flaws in the comparative method from its tendency to juxtapose non-equivalents, reinforcing the tropes of difference Europeans used to cast themselves as superior to its utilization by American historians to justify exceptionalist ideas of the United States. In addition, Siegel accuses the comparative approach of imposing binaries upon its subjects such that nuanced issues of race become affairs of “whiteness” or “blackness”. Moreover, Siegel credits anti-colonial fervor and its global “webs of resistance movements” with laying bare the “metropole’s” dependence on its colonies, a relationship believed to uni-directional was challenged by an interdependent reality. The work of anti and post colonial intellectuals crystallized around such issues, as many enacted a daily existence on the transnational level, often living, writing, and learning in first world cities. This creation of identities and knowledge served to displace the centrality of the nation-state in historical inquiry, “it posits social definition as a boundary setting process that ties identity categories together in the specular play of subject-formation familiar to scholars in many fields.”

Siegel’s attentions to anti and post colonial intellectuals finds companion arguments in Culture and Imperialism. Paying close attention to “cultural resistance” as another way of viewing history, Said explores the works of CLR James, George Antonius, Salmon Rushdie, and Franz Fanon among others. As Said acknowledges, “the post imperial writers of the Third World … bear their past within them”, meaning their works continue to exhibit a connection to imperialism well after its “official” political collapse. However, Said carefully distinguishes earlier writers such as CLR James whose work explore imperialism and its connections more broadly from more recent authors such as Ranajit Guha who focuses more exclusively on cultural productions emanating from imperialism or post-colonial networks of authority.

Relationality undergirds much of Thomas Bender’s arguments and those of his like minded colleagues in Rethinking American History in a Global Age. For too long historians focus on American exceptionalism presented the nation’s history in false terms, apart, unique from all others. Much like Stuart Hall’s Europe, American historical tropes failed to account for the influence of international evens on American domestic life. In its introductory chapter Bender identifies a key aspect informing past scholarly writing, “The near assimilation of history to national history over the course of two centuries following the creation of the nation-state …” Bender and his fellow contributors want the history of nation-states to be “contextualized on an international, even globalized scale.” American histories are “entangled” in those of other nations and peoples. The aforementioned Robin Kelley article (one of the contributions to Rethinking) illustrates this reconceptualization, framing African American history and its writing within an Atlantic World that incorporated Asia, Africa, the West Indies and Caribbean and Europe. Additionally, Bender’s own work A Nation among Nations: America’s Place in World History resituates the United States internationally, not as a dominant player but as one of many competing states. International affairs influenced American domestic policies and discourse, notably Abraham’s Lincoln’s appropriation of nineteenth century liberal ideas to his own conceptions of American freedom and citizenship. A Nation among Nation’s examines numerous other domestic episodes such as placing the American Revolution in the context of the European wars of the time to an international perspective on progressive reform following the 1890s. Bender carefully notes that the destruction of the nation state is not the point, but rather a more nuanced and accurate understanding of America’s own history and that of its place in the world.

== II. Culture, Space, and Economics ==

The threads of modernism and postmodernism in Western historical thought remain. If Modernism struggles with concepts of time, then Postmodernism’s great dilemma involves space. As noted above, several cultural theorists, anthropologists, historians, and others continue to carry forth similar temporal and spatial struggles. Abstract ideas such as time and space serve as crucial characters in Stephen Kern’s intellectual history The Culture of Time and Space 1880-1918. The collapse of space, the imposition of time, the destruction of form, and the rapidly increasing importance of the present due to technological advance drove intellectual thought, art, literature and even war in the first decades of the long twentieth century. Kern’s work argues that essential human understandings regarding time, space, direction, and form were radically transformed by technological innovations such as the telegraph, telephone, railroad, automobile and cinema which undermined traditional hierarchies throughout society. Beginning with time, Kern outlines how the implementation of Standard Time set off a countercurrent that rejected a single monolithic time for the idea of “private time” which was fluid, multiple, and constantly in flux. The concept of ‘simultaneity” emerged among artists and others suggesting that the present was not “a sequence of single local events … [but] a simultaneity of multiple distant events.” Simultaneity depended on “private time” which emphasized the present, reorienting humanity’s relation to the past and future. Ideas of the past and future remained similar to those of earlier eras but the past took on increased importance regarding the present and what came after. Stream of consciousness writing represented the importance of the present such that a single moment in thought, as evidenced by Joyce’s work, might traverse numerous periods and spaces, making individual’s private time transhistorical and potentially transnational.

Though new constructions of time suggesting pluralities and the importance of reference reverberated, the alteration of humanity’s spatiality mattered equally if not more. In terms of transportation, railroads, airplanes, cars and bicycles collapsed physical space, reorienting nations’ ideas of themselves and others. Simultaneously, the telephone, telegraph, and cinema made information nearly instantaneous, surprising, and broad. Additionally, these innovations collapsed spaces more abstractly such as with the cinematic technique of the close up which engaged the audience more directly creating shared intimacy between actor and audience and between audience members. In the world of art, the “affirmation of positive negative space” struck down artistic traditions and hierarchies just as the cinema brought numerous classes in public space together. As with time, concepts such as the plurality of space, “affirmation of negative space”, perspectivism, and the restructuring of forms undermined traditional hierarchies paralleling the collapse of aristocracies and the rise of the bourgeoisie. Kerns’ observations support those of many of the aforementioned writers. The mulitiplicity of spaces, their collapse, and the proliferation of numerous times, parallel similar arguments brought forth by Lipsitz and Appadurai. Had Kern tackled his subject differently from a wider temporal perspective, one might also add Hobsbawm since the work of many modernist writers, poets, and painters reinforced the narrow identities of nation states through their own works (such as the emphasis on ‘folk’) most notably Ezra Pound and William Butler Yeats. Of course, Kern’s emphasis on technology suggests a techonological determinism driving The Culture of Time and Space that might obscure other forces at work. Moreover, Kern’s work focuses exclusively on Western Europe and to a lesser extent the United States ignoring the work of intellectuals in the world’s colonial states. Ironically, at the time, many European artists looked to Africa and Asia for inspiration.

Modernism’s struggles to account for space and time reshaped ideas about each. The adoption of modernism by Western governments and societies along with the canonization of its various cultural products (paintings, literature, architecture) created dominant discourse which others pushed back against. Though not as monolithic as perceived , new writers, artists, and theorists resisted Modernism’s pervasive influence through a new aesthetic referred to as Postmodernism. However, as anthropologist David Harvey argues, though meant to create new oppositions and spaces for marginalized peoples, a project not unlike that of current transnationalists, post-modernity reveals a problematic construct that though gives voice to otherness, that simultaneously ghettoizes them in an “opaque otherness”. Written in 1989, Harvey’s The Condition of Postmodernity maps the cultural changes that have unfolded from Modernism to Postmodernism. Along the way numerous shifts within modernism itself helped to construct the Postmodern turn in society and academia that so dominated the 1970s and 80s. Postmodernists debated how to regard space while modernists continued to apply to it a larger social purpose. For Postmodernity, space remained independent, autonomous, and shaped by aesthetics. Postmodernism refused to strike “authoritative” or “immutable standards of aesthetic judgment” rather judgments now hinged on how “spectactular” the aesthetics proved to be.

The debate over Postmodernism does not rise and fall with David Harvey. Rather his work followed the publication of Frederick Jameson’s Postmodernity or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism five years earlier. The dialogue between the two illustrates many of the tensions within Postmodernism along with its apparent failures. Both writers viewed postmodernism as aesthetically obsessed but devoid of content. Additionally, both point to modernism’s dilemma with time arguing that Postmodernism’s fetish dealt with space. One of Postmodernism’s great weaknesses, most visible in its architecture, is its historicism or the random cannibalizing of all past styles. Postmodernisms evoke a past simulacra (his and Harvey’s word not mine) which provide a duplicate of the past or a duplicate interpretation of the past which is then reproduced ad nasuem until it becomes our idea of the past and can be mistaken for the very past it represents. Even worse as Harvey argues, the use of simulacra works to erase any trace of labor or social relations from its production but post modernists fail to acknowledge this since many “disengage” urban spaces from their dependence on function. Unlike Modernism, the use of simulacra and Postmodernism’s focus on alienations leads to “feelings” or “intensities” within its works but they remain impersonal. Some of this relates to commodities and cultural production. The machinery of capitalism for Jameson has on some level infected Postmodernism which displays an affinity for schlock or kitsch; this fetish for the mass produced, turns away from the cultural pretensions of high modernism. Harvey’s criticisms of the Postmodernism attempt to find spaces for the marginalized, bear some relation to Jameson’s who notes similar processes. According to Jameson, Postmodernism’s spatialization textualizes all in its path from bodies to the state to consumption itself. While Postmodernism creates space for marginalized groups it remains “’merely’ a cultural dominant as it coexists with other resistant and heterogenous forces which it has a vocation to subdue and incorporate.”

Both Jameson and Harvey’s critiques of Postmodernism emanate from its relation to capitalism. The commodification of cultural products, their fragmentation, and the shift from place to space, holds dire consequences for working class communities. Regarding the Postmodern crisis over space, Jameson has much to say. Place has been lost. According to Jameson, the average person can no longer map their own place in the multinational, decentralized, urban metropolis. Postmodernism locates humanity in a sort of hyperspace where “place in the U.S. no longer exists or it exists at much feebler levels.” Space itself is not the culprit but capitalism and other global systems, “The problem is still one of representation, and also of representability: we know that we are caught within these more complex global networks, because we palpably suffer the prolongations of corporate space everywhere in our daily lives. Yet we have no way of thinking about them, of modeling them, however abstractly, in our mind.” Similarly, Harvey views the same developments warily. For Harvey the reorganization of global economics privileged “powers of greater coordination”, leading to greater use of finance capital which resulted in a devaluation of commodities and a fall in standard of living. Ironically, the decline in the importance of borders has increased the value of space, “shifts in tempo or in spatial ordering redistribute social power by changing the conditions of monetary gains”. This shift from place to space, undermines working class attempts to accumulate social and political power. Jameson’s work supports this argument suggesting that Postmodernity contributed to the rise of political groups rather than a class politics. Such memberships prove smaller, easier to organize, more homogenous, and are imbued with a psychic connection lacking in class which acts as a sprawling heterogenous category that Jameson astutely notes must be convinced first that it even exists. This also reflects late capitalism in its dispersement and atomization which then requires the local concerns of groups need to be expanded and broadcast such that they may incorporate other groups

Jameson and Harvey serve as seminal texts on Postmodernity. However, though each provides sophisticated economic observations, their analysis rests on a Marxist cultural approach. Immanuel Wallerstein’s 2003 work, The Decline of American Power: The US in a Chaotic World builds on several points proposed by both Jameson and Harvey but also provides points of divergence. Wallerstein views the current global economic system as in flux. If Harvey and Jameson point to 1973 as the pivotal year for American Capitalism , Wallerstein locates this critical juncture in 1968. In this moment collapsed a popular faith in centrist liberalism as many 1968 protesters rejected U.S. hegemony, the U.S.S.R’s complicity in this dominance, and the failure of previous radicals or old left to consolidate their acquisition of state power into the expected or promised reforms. Additionally Wallerstein notes, repeatedly, “The collapse of communism in effect signified the collapse of liberalism by removing the only ideological justification behind U.S. hegemony.”

At times, The Decline of American Power treads into debates about simultaneity, spatial orderings, and the fluid nature of time. In these examples, Wallerstein echoes Modernist concerns about time that other writers such as David Harvey and Frederick Jameson discuss in their respective scholarship though his dips into more existential terrority reminiscent of Arjun Appardurai minus the emphasis on technology . For example, when Wallerstein notes that “we live in many of these social temporalities, simultaneously,” then follows that no unique universalisms exist but “also that science is the search for multiples universalisms can be navigated in a universe that is intrinsically uncertain and therefore hopefully creative,” he seems to point to the fractured overlapping nature of existence that Modernity at Large, Postmodernity, and The Condition of Postmodernity address. Moreover, Wallerstein’s work echoes the efforts of postmodernists to ascribe marginalized groups a seat at the cultural table when universalisms impose themselves broadly, “people take refuge in particularisms,” but that minorities only follow such routes when attempts at citizenship (meaning equal citizenship) have been denied or held back by illegitimate force. Certainly, Wallerstein agrees with Harvey and Jamison in their assertions that the Postmodern order remains linked to capitalism such that the tensions between temporalities, particularisms and universalisms, create a “central locus of political struggle” in which the culture of protest has been commodified. Yet, unlike, Jameson and Harvey however, Wallerstein sees hope in these new political memberships, “In the drama and struggle of recent decades new social movements based on new memberships have emerged such as the Greens, environmentalists, feminists, ethnic/racial minorities, human rights groups and anti-globalization protesters. They must debate their goals and the current transition while not neglecting short term gains as well including electoral politics.” Clearly, Wallerstein views the current condition of humanity with greater optimism taking solace in what he believes is an economic system in transition, one where new solidarities, politics, and opportunities may emerge.

Wallerstein’s optimistic proclamations found both support and criticism from numerous corners but especially from Richard Kilminster. According to Kliminster, the political influence of the nation state and the position that many social scientists take in relation to its dominance have distorted their arguments. Wallerstein serves as Kilminister primary contemporary foil. While accusing Wallerstien of ignoring cultural influences and resorting to a teleological viewpoint (which to be fair he also ascribes to Marx), he also credits Wallerstein with suggesting that scholars consider the creation of “social reciprocities and interdependencies integrated at a level above that of the nation state.” For Kilminster, the political trap that many social scientists fall into lay in their no doubt principled opposition to the dominance of Western nation states. However, he cautions that such polemical tropes lead to the establishment of arguments that can be neither proven nor disproven. Moreover, Kilminister acknowledges that peoples have traditions that predate Marxism and the like that are not simply constructed social manifestations. Still, like Wallerstein, Kilminster adopts a more positive perspective. For example, though he agrees nations remain unequal economically, rich nations are less likely to resort to violent coercion at least in comparison to colonialism. However, this viewpoint carries with it the caveat that nations remain more willing to resort to violence then most citizens. The power of poorer nations can only be grasped when one “considers the relations between interdependent peoples in the round, and not only economically.” Here once again, the influence of Said emerges as Kilminster carries forth Said’s argument to the contemporary era that western power depends heavily on parts of the world once considered peripheral.

== III. Conclusion ==

The question remains, if the naturalization of both the nation-state and free markets prove illusionary, how should historians and other scholars imagine new memberships and solidarities. Perhaps a brief exploration of Jacqure Derrida may prove useful. Several authors from Bender to Kilminster suggest that academics need to embrace a sort of “cosmopolitanism”. How should one interpret this? Kilminster argues that “Globlization fosters forms of cosmopolitan consciousness and stimulates feelings and expressions of ethnicity.” Thus, it seems to both encourage inclusiveness while simultaneously building ethnic/racial solidarities. In his 2001 On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, Derrida retreats from the nation state emphasizing the locality that other writers such as Appadurai, Wallerstein, and Lipsitz emphasize as increasingly important. The city becomes the locus of salvation. Basing his argument on Europe’s “history of hospitality” , Derrida suggests that cities must embrace this moment, balancing the needs of law, traditions of hospitality, and cosmopolitanism, “how to transform and improve the law, and of knowing if this improvement is possible within an historical space which takes place between the Law of an unconditional hospitality, offered a priori to every other, to all newcomers, whoever they may be, and the conditional laws of a right to hospitality, without which The unconditional Law of hospitality would be in danger of remaining a pious and irresponsible desire, without form and without potency, and of even being perverted at any moment.” Thus, Derrida seems to be acknowledging the importance of the very localities that Appadurai argues have grown in importance while maneuvering these localities away from nation-state conceptions. Simultaneously, Derrida encourages transnationalists like Siegel to push away borders into equating this new “cosmopolitanism” with a transnational or translocal existence.

Historians must both theorize for the future while reflecting on the past. The changes of modernity impact the view of what’s come before as the historical profession utilizes new sensibilities to locate formulations and alliances that had always been present but not always visibly. The collapse of borders, the increasing importance of space over place, the reinforcement of new solidarities apart from the nation-state and dissemination of simultaneously unifying and fracturing technologies cast light onto past historical conditions and actors that provide both continuity and discontinuity to our modern grasp of society. It remains incumbent upon historians to highlight these developments in the past, present, and future.

'''Ryan Reft'''

The Theoretical Foundations of Transnationalism: A Primer

2012-06-21T01:54:11Z

KevinBaker:

Though certainly not a recent invention, the proliferation of transnational histories over the past two decades successfully shifted scholars’ historical gaze to new concepts of membership, the impact of quickly disseminated technologies, the transformation of local, national, and international economics, and melting of traditional nation-state centered frames. Like other moments in historiography, the “transnational turn” as Micol Siegel labels it, illustrates the influences of the period. Increased flows of labor and goods ignorant of national borders, images shot across continents and oceans tying diasporas more closely to their place of origin despite distances of thousands of miles separating the two, or the undeniable influence of, not necessarily new but more powerful, multinationals. All these factors and more serve to alter not only historians’ view of history, but suggest several points of inquiry. Of these numerous questions, four serve as this paper’s central focus. How have historians accounted for the nation-state and its interplay with the mass migrations and technological innovations of the 20th and 21st century? What are the new economic structures and flows that underwrite the transnational approach and what are their attendant meanings for historical actors and scholars alike? How has transnationalism affected perceptions of space, time and movement? What has this all meant for historians sense of self and their work?

== I. The Nation-State, Borders, and Race ==

In his article, “But a Local Phase of a World Problem: Black History’s Global Vision, 1883-1950”, Robin D.G. Kelley explored the various ways African, Caribbean/West Indian, and African American scholars long embraced the transnational approach to history. Longstanding diasporas of black communities created through forced labor, slavery, migration and imperialism served to create a world in which black writers sought to circumvent national borders. How much of this is due to past discrimination and second class citizenship serves as a point of debate within Kelley’s piece, however it reveals an important point: American historians attentions to transnationalism have arrived rather late in the day.

Several years before Kelley’s article, Marxist historian Eric Hobsbaum explored the meaning of nationalism and the nation-state in Nations and Nationalism Since 1780: Programme, Myth, and Reality. Relying heavily on Bendict Anderson’s Imagined Communities, Hobsbaum argues that the standard solidarities based on language, ethnicity, and religion developed only recently as constructs accelerated by post 1880s processes such as Wilson’s declaration of self determination, the decline of imperial empires, and the harsh formation of nation-states out of colonialism’s decline. The “new nationalism” which surfaced illustrated marked differences from earlier variants. First, it abandoned the threshold principle, meaning smaller nation-states proved viable politically. Second, ethnicity/language became central, whereas previously each might account for some stratification internally, both failed to mobilize large numbers of peoples. Third, a political shift rightwards emphasized nation and flag, punishing internal minorities whom might not fit constructed national ideals. As nations grew and economies expanded numerous ethnic groups made choices about which language they chose to identify with for several reasons but significant among them economic and social benefits (i.e. Poles that chose to speak German etc.) National consciousness did develop, however it grew as did numerous other forms of consciousness.

Hobsbawm and Anderson’s questioning of the nation-states “inherent presence” serves as two of the earlier academic salvos aimed at deconstructing national oriented research. The rise of electronic media, global migrations of peoples, diverse financial systems and tools, along with other developing factors have led numerous others to openly question the efficacy of the nation state. Multivalent consciousness, the kind Hobsbawm hints at, emerges as a key pivot for anthropologist Arjun Appadurai in his work Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. For Appadurai, globalization fundamentally changed the flow of capital, peoples, and images. Technology allows for new diasporic connections, ones that allow peoples to remain more closely connected than ever to their origins. This new spatialization or what the author categorizes as deterritorialization combined with the rise of electronic media contributes to the unmooring of the nation-state from traditionally defined nation based identities. Moreover, the process of globalization fetishizes localities as “the globally dispersed forces that actually drive the production process.” Appadurai cautions anthropologists, sociologists and historians to avoid imposing western historical models of capital development or democracy, noting that these new developments requires more flexible and insightful analysis, since the growth of such concepts need not occur identically to European or American examples

George Lipsitz agrees with Appadurai’s “deterritorialization” arguing that connections between cultures and places once intertwined with industrial area political and cultural practices lack the pervasiveness of past iterations. Regarding culture, Lipsitz advises a new and different imagination. In Modernity at Large, Appadurai constructs a theoretical apparatus made up of five distinctive “cultural flows” consisting of of ethnoscapes, mediascapes, financescapes, ideoscapes, and technoscapes. Appadurai suggests that though at times in agreement, these “scapes” frequently relate to one another disjunctively. People’s, nation-states, and others marshall public spheres and counterpublics to reimagine their own organizational or ethnic identities or as the author notes, they create “scripts” that allow for “imagined worlds” which may apply to their own existence or “those of others living in other places”. Lipsitz concurs even quoting Appadurai but taking issue with his underestimation of the continuing power of “local spaces memories and practices, [moreover] his framework does not adequately account for the degree of oppressive centralized power basic to the creation of these new spaces” . Still, Lipsitz certainly agrees with the need for the field of American Studies to engage with “global popular culture”, “We are witnessing an inversion of prestige, a moment when diasporic, nomadic, and fugitive slave cultures from the margins seem to speak more powerfully to present conditions than do metropolitan cultures committed to the congruence of culture culture and place.” Again like Appadurai, Lispitz calls for imagination in realizing the new identities, memberships, and perspectives emerging from the vast migrations of capital, peoples, and technologies.

The expectation of new economic, social, or political developments unfolding in European or Western traditions disrupted the production of credible history. The imposition of one region’s history of development on another resulted in ethnocentric, racially infected, muddled historical understandings. Critically, the construction of discourse plays a role in spreading these flawed understandings. In relation, Stuart Hall traces the creation of a Western European discourse toward the “other”. Borrowing from Edward Said and Michele Foucault, Hall illustrates how Foucault’s ideas regarding discourse and “truth regimes” which Said rightly pointed out constructed an “Orientalism” that fetishized non-western peoples (inscribing on them the difference of inferiority). As Hall notes, the differences Europeans utilized to separate themselves from non-white peoples, often grossly misinterpreted native civilizations as simple or backwards, ignoring the complex social, political and economic structures which served as the foundations of indigenous civilizations. The failure of Europeans to consider an alternate way of producing markets, civil society and government led them to consider such differences as signs of primitiveness. The pervasiveness of such discourse infected the work of even the most visionary theorists, most notably Marx and Weber, who embraced many of the linear progressive assumptions of “The West and the Rest” trope. If Hobsbawm suggests religion as a national organizing principle in the late and early twentieth century remains problematic, Hall argues that in earlier eras the unifying force of Christiandom provided a “co-identity” in which “Europe’s Christian identity – what made its civilization distinct and unique – was in its first instance, essentially religious and Christian.” Only later did Europe develop its geographical, political, and economic identity. Moreover, Hall agrees with Said that the West’s construction of “the Rest” reveals as much about itself as its discourse of the other. Without “the Rest”, the West loses its meaning, a relational identity obscured by its emphasis on perceived difference.

Michele Foucault traces this use of difference from the Classical Age of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries to its transformation due to Enlightenment influences in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. According to Foucault, the “Classical Age” created a table or picture based on the representations of three fields: natural history, language, and biology. Between them they establish a sort of matrix upon which knowledge of the age rested, “The nature of things, their coexistence, the way in which they are linked together and communicate is nothing other than their resemblance. And that resemblance is visible only in the network of signs that crossed the world from one end to the other.” With the closing decades of the eighteenth century came change. Discontinuities arose. The table no longer sufficed as “the general area of knowledge is no longer that of identities and differences, that of non-quantitative orders, that of a universal characterization, of a general taxinomnia, of a non-measurable mathesis, but an area made up of organic structures, that is, of internal relations between elements whose totality performs a function… these organic structures are discontinuous … they do not form a table of unbroken simultaneities, but that certain of them are on the same level whereas others form series or linear sequences.” In this way, analogy and succession become the hallmarks of ordering various “empiricities”. From the 1800s on, history “deployed … the analogies that connect distinct organic structures to one another. “ Of course, Foucault’s history places laws on the “analysis of production, the analysis of organically structured beings, and lastly, on the analysis of linguistic groups. History gives place to analogical organic structures, just as Order opened the way to successive identities and differences.”

As Hall works illustrates not only Foucault’s thoughts have impacted transnational orientations. Edward Said’s Orientalism greatly influenced a generation of academics. In Orientalism, Said took Western historians and academics to task for constructing an essentialized view of the Asian and the Middle East which revealed as much about Western culture than those outside of Europe and the Americas. Traversing similar terrain, Said’s Culture and Imperialism explores the role of “culture” in the imperial project and culture’s connections globally, illustrating a clear influence on the thought of Stuart Hall and several other writers of transnational histories. Focusing on the Western Empires of the nineteenth and twentieth century and their cultural productions , Said notes that too few scholars have paid close attention to “the privileged role of culture in the modern imperial experience” noting that its “global reach” continues to “cast a shadow over our own times.”

Much like Arjun Appadurai , Said attempts to illuminate obscured relationships between imperialism and its colonies taking note of imperialism’s obscured presence in the domestic culture of imperializing nations. Said’s literary examples include Thomas Hardy, Albert Camus, and Chalers Dickens among others. Utilizing examples such as Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, Said illustrates the implicit connections between European protagonists and Europe itself to Asia , Middle East, and the Caribbean. For example, Jane Austen’s protagonists depends on Antigua for their economic livelihood, a dependency often presented by the text as peripheral. As evidence of Hall’s “noble savage” argument, Said notes that Heart of Darkness' Marlowe simultaneously reinforces ideas about non whites and Africa while also expressing a deep skepticism about the project of imperialism itself. Said suggests that the “great texts” of European and American culture must be reexamined such that scholars “give emphasis and voice to what is silent or marginally represented.” In addition, Accordingly, the metropole/periphery formation cast subjectivities on the Middle East and Asia as well as other realms of empire, as places younger Europeans went to “sow their oats”, a wild adventure among irrational non-western peoples. Again, one finds the root of similar observations which Hall puts forth.

If Culture and Imperialism’s first half resonates with critiques by Stuart Hall, its latter portion clearly influenced Micol Siegel’s “Beyond Comparison: Comparative Method after the Transnational Turn.” Siegel explores the flaws in the comparative method from its tendency to juxtapose non-equivalents, reinforcing the tropes of difference Europeans used to cast themselves as superior to its utilization by American historians to justify exceptionalist ideas of the United States. In addition, Siegel accuses the comparative approach of imposing binaries upon its subjects such that nuanced issues of race become affairs of “whiteness” or “blackness”. Moreover, Siegel credits anti-colonial fervor and its global “webs of resistance movements” with laying bare the “metropole’s” dependence on its colonies, a relationship believed to uni-directional was challenged by an interdependent reality. The work of anti and post colonial intellectuals crystallized around such issues, as many enacted a daily existence on the transnational level, often living, writing, and learning in first world cities. This creation of identities and knowledge served to displace the centrality of the nation-state in historical inquiry, “it posits social definition as a boundary setting process that ties identity categories together in the specular play of subject-formation familiar to scholars in many fields.”

Siegel’s attentions to anti and post colonial intellectuals finds companion arguments in Culture and Imperialism. Paying close attention to “cultural resistance” as another way of viewing history, Said explores the works of CLR James, George Antonius, Salmon Rushdie, and Franz Fanon among others. As Said acknowledges, “the post imperial writers of the Third World … bear their past within them”, meaning their works continue to exhibit a connection to imperialism well after its “official” political collapse. However, Said carefully distinguishes earlier writers such as CLR James whose work explore imperialism and its connections more broadly from more recent authors such as Ranajit Guha who focuses more exclusively on cultural productions emanating from imperialism or post-colonial networks of authority.

Relationality undergirds much of Thomas Bender’s arguments and those of his like minded colleagues in Rethinking American History in a Global Age. For too long historians focus on American exceptionalism presented the nation’s history in false terms, apart, unique from all others. Much like Stuart Hall’s Europe, American historical tropes failed to account for the influence of international evens on American domestic life. In its introductory chapter Bender identifies a key aspect informing past scholarly writing, “The near assimilation of history to national history over the course of two centuries following the creation of the nation-state …” Bender and his fellow contributors want the history of nation-states to be “contextualized on an international, even globalized scale.” American histories are “entangled” in those of other nations and peoples. The aforementioned Robin Kelley article (one of the contributions to Rethinking) illustrates this reconceptualization, framing African American history and its writing within an Atlantic World that incorporated Asia, Africa, the West Indies and Caribbean and Europe. Additionally, Bender’s own work A Nation among Nations: America’s Place in World History resituates the United States internationally, not as a dominant player but as one of many competing states. International affairs influenced American domestic policies and discourse, notably Abraham’s Lincoln’s appropriation of nineteenth century liberal ideas to his own conceptions of American freedom and citizenship. A Nation among Nation’s examines numerous other domestic episodes such as placing the American Revolution in the context of the European wars of the time to an international perspective on progressive reform following the 1890s. Bender carefully notes that the destruction of the nation state is not the point, but rather a more nuanced and accurate understanding of America’s own history and that of its place in the world.

II. Culture, Space, and Economics

The threads of modernism and postmodernism in Western historical thought remain. If Modernism struggles with concepts of time, then Postmodernism’s great dilemma involves space. As noted above, several cultural theorists, anthropologists, historians, and others continue to carry forth similar temporal and spatial struggles. Abstract ideas such as time and space serve as crucial characters in Stephen Kern’s intellectual history The Culture of Time and Space 1880-1918. The collapse of space, the imposition of time, the destruction of form, and the rapidly increasing importance of the present due to technological advance drove intellectual thought, art, literature and even war in the first decades of the long twentieth century. Kern’s work argues that essential human understandings regarding time, space, direction, and form were radically transformed by technological innovations such as the telegraph, telephone, railroad, automobile and cinema which undermined traditional hierarchies throughout society. Beginning with time, Kern outlines how the implementation of Standard Time set off a countercurrent that rejected a single monolithic time for the idea of “private time” which was fluid, multiple, and constantly in flux. The concept of ‘simultaneity” emerged among artists and others suggesting that the present was not “a sequence of single local events … [but] a simultaneity of multiple distant events.” Simultaneity depended on “private time” which emphasized the present, reorienting humanity’s relation to the past and future. Ideas of the past and future remained similar to those of earlier eras but the past took on increased importance regarding the present and what came after. Stream of consciousness writing represented the importance of the present such that a single moment in thought, as evidenced by Joyce’s work, might traverse numerous periods and spaces, making individual’s private time transhistorical and potentially transnational.

Though new constructions of time suggesting pluralities and the importance of reference reverberated, the alteration of humanity’s spatiality mattered equally if not more. In terms of transportation, railroads, airplanes, cars and bicycles collapsed physical space, reorienting nations’ ideas of themselves and others. Simultaneously, the telephone, telegraph, and cinema made information nearly instantaneous, surprising, and broad. Additionally, these innovations collapsed spaces more abstractly such as with the cinematic technique of the close up which engaged the audience more directly creating shared intimacy between actor and audience and between audience members. In the world of art, the “affirmation of positive negative space” struck down artistic traditions and hierarchies just as the cinema brought numerous classes in public space together. As with time, concepts such as the plurality of space, “affirmation of negative space”, perspectivism, and the restructuring of forms undermined traditional hierarchies paralleling the collapse of aristocracies and the rise of the bourgeoisie. Kerns’ observations support those of many of the aforementioned writers. The mulitiplicity of spaces, their collapse, and the proliferation of numerous times, parallel similar arguments brought forth by Lipsitz and Appadurai. Had Kern tackled his subject differently from a wider temporal perspective, one might also add Hobsbawm since the work of many modernist writers, poets, and painters reinforced the narrow identities of nation states through their own works (such as the emphasis on ‘folk’) most notably Ezra Pound and William Butler Yeats. Of course, Kern’s emphasis on technology suggests a techonological determinism driving The Culture of Time and Space that might obscure other forces at work. Moreover, Kern’s work focuses exclusively on Western Europe and to a lesser extent the United States ignoring the work of intellectuals in the world’s colonial states. Ironically, at the time, many European artists looked to Africa and Asia for inspiration.

Modernism’s struggles to account for space and time reshaped ideas about each. The adoption of modernism by Western governments and societies along with the canonization of its various cultural products (paintings, literature, architecture) created dominant discourse which others pushed back against. Though not as monolithic as perceived , new writers, artists, and theorists resisted Modernism’s pervasive influence through a new aesthetic referred to as Postmodernism. However, as anthropologist David Harvey argues, though meant to create new oppositions and spaces for marginalized peoples, a project not unlike that of current transnationalists, post-modernity reveals a problematic construct that though gives voice to otherness, that simultaneously ghettoizes them in an “opaque otherness”. Written in 1989, Harvey’s The Condition of Postmodernity maps the cultural changes that have unfolded from Modernism to Postmodernism. Along the way numerous shifts within modernism itself helped to construct the Postmodern turn in society and academia that so dominated the 1970s and 80s. Postmodernists debated how to regard space while modernists continued to apply to it a larger social purpose. For Postmodernity, space remained independent, autonomous, and shaped by aesthetics. Postmodernism refused to strike “authoritative” or “immutable standards of aesthetic judgment” rather judgments now hinged on how “spectactular” the aesthetics proved to be.

The debate over Postmodernism does not rise and fall with David Harvey. Rather his work followed the publication of Frederick Jameson’s Postmodernity or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism five years earlier. The dialogue between the two illustrates many of the tensions within Postmodernism along with its apparent failures. Both writers viewed postmodernism as aesthetically obsessed but devoid of content. Additionally, both point to modernism’s dilemma with time arguing that Postmodernism’s fetish dealt with space. One of Postmodernism’s great weaknesses, most visible in its architecture, is its historicism or the random cannibalizing of all past styles. Postmodernisms evoke a past simulacra (his and Harvey’s word not mine) which provide a duplicate of the past or a duplicate interpretation of the past which is then reproduced ad nasuem until it becomes our idea of the past and can be mistaken for the very past it represents. Even worse as Harvey argues, the use of simulacra works to erase any trace of labor or social relations from its production but post modernists fail to acknowledge this since many “disengage” urban spaces from their dependence on function. Unlike Modernism, the use of simulacra and Postmodernism’s focus on alienations leads to “feelings” or “intensities” within its works but they remain impersonal. Some of this relates to commodities and cultural production. The machinery of capitalism for Jameson has on some level infected Postmodernism which displays an affinity for schlock or kitsch; this fetish for the mass produced, turns away from the cultural pretensions of high modernism. Harvey’s criticisms of the Postmodernism attempt to find spaces for the marginalized, bear some relation to Jameson’s who notes similar processes. According to Jameson, Postmodernism’s spatialization textualizes all in its path from bodies to the state to consumption itself. While Postmodernism creates space for marginalized groups it remains “’merely’ a cultural dominant as it coexists with other resistant and heterogenous forces which it has a vocation to subdue and incorporate.”

Both Jameson and Harvey’s critiques of Postmodernism emanate from its relation to capitalism. The commodification of cultural products, their fragmentation, and the shift from place to space, holds dire consequences for working class communities. Regarding the Postmodern crisis over space, Jameson has much to say. Place has been lost. According to Jameson, the average person can no longer map their own place in the multinational, decentralized, urban metropolis. Postmodernism locates humanity in a sort of hyperspace where “place in the U.S. no longer exists or it exists at much feebler levels.” Space itself is not the culprit but capitalism and other global systems, “The problem is still one of representation, and also of representability: we know that we are caught within these more complex global networks, because we palpably suffer the prolongations of corporate space everywhere in our daily lives. Yet we have no way of thinking about them, of modeling them, however abstractly, in our mind.” Similarly, Harvey views the same developments warily. For Harvey the reorganization of global economics privileged “powers of greater coordination”, leading to greater use of finance capital which resulted in a devaluation of commodities and a fall in standard of living. Ironically, the decline in the importance of borders has increased the value of space, “shifts in tempo or in spatial ordering redistribute social power by changing the conditions of monetary gains”. This shift from place to space, undermines working class attempts to accumulate social and political power. Jameson’s work supports this argument suggesting that Postmodernity contributed to the rise of political groups rather than a class politics. Such memberships prove smaller, easier to organize, more homogenous, and are imbued with a psychic connection lacking in class which acts as a sprawling heterogenous category that Jameson astutely notes must be convinced first that it even exists. This also reflects late capitalism in its dispersement and atomization which then requires the local concerns of groups need to be expanded and broadcast such that they may incorporate other groups

Jameson and Harvey serve as seminal texts on Postmodernity. However, though each provides sophisticated economic observations, their analysis rests on a Marxist cultural approach. Immanuel Wallerstein’s 2003 work, The Decline of American Power: The US in a Chaotic World builds on several points proposed by both Jameson and Harvey but also provides points of divergence. Wallerstein views the current global economic system as in flux. If Harvey and Jameson point to 1973 as the pivotal year for American Capitalism , Wallerstein locates this critical juncture in 1968. In this moment collapsed a popular faith in centrist liberalism as many 1968 protesters rejected U.S. hegemony, the U.S.S.R’s complicity in this dominance, and the failure of previous radicals or old left to consolidate their acquisition of state power into the expected or promised reforms. Additionally Wallerstein notes, repeatedly, “The collapse of communism in effect signified the collapse of liberalism by removing the only ideological justification behind U.S. hegemony.”

At times, The Decline of American Power treads into debates about simultaneity, spatial orderings, and the fluid nature of time. In these examples, Wallerstein echoes Modernist concerns about time that other writers such as David Harvey and Frederick Jameson discuss in their respective scholarship though his dips into more existential terrority reminiscent of Arjun Appardurai minus the emphasis on technology . For example, when Wallerstein notes that “we live in many of these social temporalities, simultaneously,” then follows that no unique universalisms exist but “also that science is the search for multiples universalisms can be navigated in a universe that is intrinsically uncertain and therefore hopefully creative,” he seems to point to the fractured overlapping nature of existence that Modernity at Large, Postmodernity, and The Condition of Postmodernity address. Moreover, Wallerstein’s work echoes the efforts of postmodernists to ascribe marginalized groups a seat at the cultural table when universalisms impose themselves broadly, “people take refuge in particularisms,” but that minorities only follow such routes when attempts at citizenship (meaning equal citizenship) have been denied or held back by illegitimate force. Certainly, Wallerstein agrees with Harvey and Jamison in their assertions that the Postmodern order remains linked to capitalism such that the tensions between temporalities, particularisms and universalisms, create a “central locus of political struggle” in which the culture of protest has been commodified. Yet, unlike, Jameson and Harvey however, Wallerstein sees hope in these new political memberships, “In the drama and struggle of recent decades new social movements based on new memberships have emerged such as the Greens, environmentalists, feminists, ethnic/racial minorities, human rights groups and anti-globalization protesters. They must debate their goals and the current transition while not neglecting short term gains as well including electoral politics.” Clearly, Wallerstein views the current condition of humanity with greater optimism taking solace in what he believes is an economic system in transition, one where new solidarities, politics, and opportunities may emerge.

Wallerstein’s optimistic proclamations found both support and criticism from numerous corners but especially from Richard Kilminster. According to Kliminster, the political influence of the nation state and the position that many social scientists take in relation to its dominance have distorted their arguments. Wallerstein serves as Kilminister primary contemporary foil. While accusing Wallerstien of ignoring cultural influences and resorting to a teleological viewpoint (which to be fair he also ascribes to Marx), he also credits Wallerstein with suggesting that scholars consider the creation of “social reciprocities and interdependencies integrated at a level above that of the nation state.” For Kilminster, the political trap that many social scientists fall into lay in their no doubt principled opposition to the dominance of Western nation states. However, he cautions that such polemical tropes lead to the establishment of arguments that can be neither proven nor disproven. Moreover, Kilminister acknowledges that peoples have traditions that predate Marxism and the like that are not simply constructed social manifestations. Still, like Wallerstein, Kilminster adopts a more positive perspective. For example, though he agrees nations remain unequal economically, rich nations are less likely to resort to violent coercion at least in comparison to colonialism. However, this viewpoint carries with it the caveat that nations remain more willing to resort to violence then most citizens. The power of poorer nations can only be grasped when one “considers the relations between interdependent peoples in the round, and not only economically.” Here once again, the influence of Said emerges as Kilminster carries forth Said’s argument to the contemporary era that western power depends heavily on parts of the world once considered peripheral.

III. Conclusion

The question remains, if the naturalization of both the nation-state and free markets prove illusionary, how should historians and other scholars imagine new memberships and solidarities. Perhaps a brief exploration of Jacqure Derrida may prove useful. Several authors from Bender to Kilminster suggest that academics need to embrace a sort of “cosmopolitanism”. How should one interpret this? Kilminster argues that “Globlization fosters forms of cosmopolitan consciousness and stimulates feelings and expressions of ethnicity.” Thus, it seems to both encourage inclusiveness while simultaneously building ethnic/racial solidarities. In his 2001 On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, Derrida retreats from the nation state emphasizing the locality that other writers such as Appadurai, Wallerstein, and Lipsitz emphasize as increasingly important. The city becomes the locus of salvation. Basing his argument on Europe’s “history of hospitality” , Derrida suggests that cities must embrace this moment, balancing the needs of law, traditions of hospitality, and cosmopolitanism, “how to transform and improve the law, and of knowing if this improvement is possible within an historical space which takes place between the Law of an unconditional hospitality, offered a priori to every other, to all newcomers, whoever they may be, and the conditional laws of a right to hospitality, without which The unconditional Law of hospitality would be in danger of remaining a pious and irresponsible desire, without form and without potency, and of even being perverted at any moment.” Thus, Derrida seems to be acknowledging the importance of the very localities that Appadurai argues have grown in importance while maneuvering these localities away from nation-state conceptions. Simultaneously, Derrida encourages transnationalists like Siegel to push away borders into equating this new “cosmopolitanism” with a transnational or translocal existence.

Historians must both theorize for the future while reflecting on the past. The changes of modernity impact the view of what’s come before as the historical profession utilizes new sensibilities to locate formulations and alliances that had always been present but not always visibly. The collapse of borders, the increasing importance of space over place, the reinforcement of new solidarities apart from the nation-state and dissemination of simultaneously unifying and fracturing technologies cast light onto past historical conditions and actors that provide both continuity and discontinuity to our modern grasp of society. It remains incumbent upon historians to highlight these developments in the past, present, and future.

'''Ryan Reft'''

American Empire: The Domestic and International Ramifications of U.S. Imperialism

2012-06-21T01:52:46Z

KevinBaker: Created page with " The pervasive influence of late nineteenth and twentieth century America remains a potent topic of discussion. Today some writers of globalization talk of America’s economic ..."

The pervasive influence of late nineteenth and twentieth century America remains a potent topic of discussion. Today some writers of globalization talk of America’s economic and cultural influence, but fail to mention its past “informal empire”. As many scholars argue, this erasure obscures a more complex and contradictory past. Under historical scrutiny, the benevolence of American empire fades, replaced by a more mechanistic racialized apparatus. This informal empire peaked in the period from 1898 to the 1920s, but its influence remained as did the US presence throughout its former colonial subjects.

Though initially, many viewed the influence of empire as a unidirectional process in which western powers like the U.S. carried civilization and economic development to backward peoples, historians now emphasize the multi-directional nature of imperialism. Imperial powers found their nations altered racially and socially as newly colonized people migrated to the metropole. The infusion of race and religious difference sparked numerous events and movements. Moreover, the American model of empire folded ideas about gender, domesticity, race, and citizenship into a complex, contradictory mix that created relational identities, ideological conflicts, and unintended consequences. The transnational nature of imperial relations transformed national identities while suggesting American exceptionalism proved not that exceptional as the United States model replicated many aspects of its European counterparts.

The consequences of two world wars along with rising anti-colonial movements in Asia and Africa undermined the foundations of imperialism. However, the post WWII Cold War greatly affected relations between the United States, USSR, China, Cuba, and the developing world. Again, as with the informal empire of an earlier period, Cold War maneuvering resulted in domestic consequences tied discretely to America’s foreign endeavors. Moreover, the Third World resistance movements and New Left of American and European campuses emerged in dialogue with one another over the failures of their governments and leaders, engaging the third world in transnational protests that had previously been viewed as unconnected.

Over the course of the past century into the current epoch, historians have viewed the above developments in numerous ways. If the consensus school attempted to construct an American ideal in the face of Cold War tensions, the latter social historians of the 1960s and 1970s looked to recover the histories of marginalized peoples and groups, questioning the Consensus School and the governments that came into being post WWII. The postmodern and transnational turn of the 1980s and 1990s shifted to a study of discourse and structures, emphasizing the connectedness of ideas and movements across the globe where previous histories had confined studies to discrete nation states. In this new amalgamation, several historians noted that though the U.S. no longer imposed formal empire at gun’s length, post WWII economic changes in international finance secured American financial dominance which along with Cold War conflicts created a new template for empire, one masked by international organizations such as the World Bank or IMF whose rules favor U.S. interests.

Writing in 1959, William Appleman Williams surveyed the wreckage of U.S. diplomacy from the Spanish American War to the quagmire of Southeast Asia. Long dominated by elites, U.S. foreign policy bred the very problems that Americans had argued they wanted to export: democracy, self-determination, and the development of laizze faire capitalism. Williams found that much of U.S. foreign policy undermined its stated goals, shifting taxpayer money in support of the expansion of private American industries into developing nations (China, Philippines). The use of “informal empire” did little to assuage the raw feelings of native populations (not necessarily indigenous here), thus Williams opens his introduction with reflections on the reasons for Cuba’s 1959 Communist Revolution. The inability of policymakers, government officials, and the U.S. public itself to consider the viewpoints of those nations it so “generously” aided, contributed to the tragedy of U.S. policy.

By the late nineteenth century, fears regarding the closing of the frontier, most notably in relation to Frederick Jackson Turner’s safety valve thesis, resulted in the pervasive belief that the United States needed to expand in order to solve its domestic problems. The need for markets drove much of this discourse as many policymakers, farmers, and others pushed for economic expansion, “By 1895, many individuals and groups were stressing the importance of expansion as a way to solve domestic economic problems” (1). However, America and its representatives claimed to abhor European colonialism/imperialism and its ramifications on the free market. Thus, United States policymakers drafted the Open Door Notes (2) which according to Williams drove U.S. foreign policy for much of the 20th century. Though at the time of its initial publication, many historians portrayed the battle over this policy as internal and one that occurred between “imperialists led by Roosevelt and Lodge and anti-imperialists led by William Jennings Bryan, Grover Cleveland, and Carl Schurz,” Williams argues that this depiction remains inaccurate. Rather a third group “a coalition of businessmen, intellectuals, and politicians who opposed traditional colonialism and advocated instead a polity of an open door through which America’s preponderant economic strength would enter and dominate all underdeveloped areas of the world” emerged as the catalyst and ultimate winner in this debate. (3) Williams acknowledges the brilliance of this maneuver while noting that its success contributed to its downfall, “If it ultimately failed, it was not because it was foolish or weak, but because it was so successful. The empire that was built according to the strategy and tactics of the Open Door Notes engendered the antagonisms created by all empires, and it is that opposition which posed so many difficulties for American diplomacy after World War II.” (4)

Initially at least, reformers did not embrace this new policy, however by the mid 1890s most were on board even mimicking the rhetoric of politicians, “Missionaries came to sound more and more like political leaders, who were themselves submerging their domestic ideological differences at the water’s edge in a general agreement on expansion as a reform movement.” (5) The convergence of the reform movement along with the support of business led to a strange development in which U.S. expansionism came to be seen by its practitioners as providing the bundled benefits of democracy/civilization/order and a developed capitalist economic system that would bring financial prosperity to all. However, there were implicit contradictions in this approach. (6) First, the capitalism imported or brought to such peoples inherently benefited US manufacturers over all others, while keeping the state under “informal empire” in a dependency status. No laissez faire economy could develop. Second, though by WWI, this policy claimed to be exporting self-determination, the U.S. position in each region’s economic and political affairs clearly undermined this goal. (7) American business leaders in this period continue to play a key role. For example, the need for large scale capital accumulation which was necessary in order to invest in developing markets remained out of reach for many. However, financiers and industrialists lobbied the state for loans and grants. Some favored an international consortium, which scholars might take for early multilateralism, but in reality, US business leaders assumed they would dominate such a consortium revealing a long thread related to U.S. international action .(8) Thus, by the WWI period, Americans had developed “an all encompassing conception of the world. Americans could not only conquer nature, but they could put their self interest to work to produce the well being and harmony of the world. Their theory not only held that they could do these things; it asserted the natural necessity of action. Any other course violated natural law and thus subverted the harmony of interests.” (9)

The period between 1912 and 1921 did alter conceptions. (10) The emergence of social revolutions threatened U.S. imperialist structures. Since the relationship between foreign markets and U.S. domestic prosperity had been naturalized these uprisings represented a direct threat to U.S. policy/beliefs. As such, the U.S. developed a heightened fear of such revolutions that would infect its decision making for decades afterward including the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Vietnam War.

William’s work reframed not only American historiography, but also influenced leading individuals and programs within it. For example, Williams rehabilitates Herbert Hoover, illustrating that FDR more or less adopted Hoover’s foreign policy of development in which U.S. expansionism must raise the economic fortunes of all peoples not just one class. As such FDR’s Good Neighbor Policy envisioned a similar goal thus they extended Hoover’s idea to developmental loans to Latin America. New Deal trade policies illustrate the continuity of the Open Door thesis: 1) it reinvigorated, extended, sustained the tradition “view of overseas economic expansion 2) “the emphasis on trade expansion, and upon the Open Door Policy, served to define the nature and the causes of danger and conflict in international affairs …by externalizing good, so also was evil externalized: domestic problems and difficulties became issues of foreign policy …” 3) “it sustained and even deepened, the pattern of free trade imperialism or informal empire that had evolved out of British economic policy in the nineteenth century.” (11) Note that another problem created by this policy was the creation of pockets of “modernism” such that U.S. “colonies” featured centers of economic development surrounded by areas of economic depression highlighting U.S. interference and its unequal benefits.

One of the key aspects to Williams’ reframing of U.S. foreign policy involves his use of the Open Door Policy as a continued force on US diplomacy. For example, he argues the US already contemplated war with Japan and Germany prior to Pearl Harbor because of the belief that the U.S. needed to continue expanding its markets. The influence of corporate leadership within FDR’s administration and outside of it remained a potent force. Similarly, the Cold War containment policies were actually an expression of U.S. economic superiority such that American policy makers believed that they could create footholds in Eastern Europe allowing for economic dominance, which in turn could lead to political control. Williams contends few feared real war with the USSR, “The emphasis on open door expansion and the assumption of the inevitable downfall of the Soviet Union again indicated that American leaders were not motivated by fear of Russian military attack.” (12) Moreover, according to Williams, U.S. anti-Soviet propaganda poisoned relations and the public view of the USSR, contributing to its repressive policies in Eastern Europe and elsewhere. Here, Williams illustrates one of his main points, U.S. policy failed to view events from the perspective of its fellow nations. This extended to the American public. An inability to conceptualize the difficulties of other nations while focusing excessively on the needs of the U.S. created a diplomacy that lacked awareness. This led to the U.S. overplaying its hand with the leaders of the USSR who in turn took increasingly rigid positions against U.S. intentions. The threat of nuclear annihilation by prominent American diplomats toward their Russian counterparts did little to ease such concerns. Moreover, U.S. propaganda portrayed the USSR as totalitarian before the fact meaning the public already ascribed to it a brutality it had not yet achieved. Of course, one might quibble with such conclusions, one wonders if he might change some of his tone toward the USSR in light of what historians now know of Soviet brutality. This is not to say his somewhat naïve position invalidates his critiques of US policy rather it acknowledges that the USSR was probably neither as evil as its harshest critics maintain nor as good as some of its defenders suggest.

In relation to the 1920s, policy makers of the 1960s mirrored their predecessor’s mistaken evaluation of social revolutions. (13) As such, Americans blamed all that was wrong in the world and sometimes domestically on the USSR without assessing their own contributions to such problems. Even policymakers like George Kennan had so internalized the Open Door policy that it seemed natural, “perhaps the greatest is the fact that he had so internalized the assumptions and principles of the Open Door Policy that he thought he was proposing a radically different program. This indeed is the final act in the transformation of a utopia into an ideology.” (14)
William Appleman William’s shot across the historical bow led to numerous denuncations by more traditional writers who critiqued his work for its Marxist political leanings, while other scholars labeled Williams an outright communist. Still, some critics argued William’s view of Soviet intentions appeared naïve. America in the World: The Historiography of American Foreign Relations Since 1941, a collection of essays on the state of post WWII American diplomatic history, opens with an acknowledgement to William’s contributions (though several prominent historians — among them John Lewis Gaddis — found Williams extrapolations problematic) then proceeds in its first sections to debate the postmodern and transnational turn in diplomatic history. Melvyn Leffler credits Williams with connecting domestic concerns with foreign policy, a trend he encourages, but suggests recent developments in cultural history have contributed to the field’s fragmentation.

If the 1950’s featured the work of “Consensus School” scholars, the 1960s-70s marked by social turmoil, new populations attending graduate school (think lower and low middle income students, more women and people of color), and a greater attention to social history generally produced what scholars like Gaddis might decry as fragmented uneven account of diplomacy.

The book runs through the historiography of numerous categories – American foreign relations, WWII diplomacy, the use of the atomic bomb, origins of the Cold War in Europe and the Near East, views of the Korean War since 1980, Eisenhower revisionism, JFK, Vietnam, Foreign relations since 1969, synthesis of Latin American foreign relations with the US since WWII, America and the Middle East since 1945, the Cold War in Asia, American economic diplomacy, and the history of American intelligence since 1945. Each proves useful regarding its particular area of concern. Additionally, the terms “revisionist” and “post-revisionist” along with their meanings are highly related to context and what arguments came before. A revisionist view of JFK might be post -revisionist if the categorization were different. However, each article fleshes out the various conclusions and directions the particular category has explored.

As previously mentioned, the book’s first section proves of great interest in terms of considering transnational and postmodern turns in the field. Hogan, Bruce Cummings, Michael H. Hunt, and Melvyn P. Leffler debate the present state and future of diplomatic history from a more theoretical standpoint. Additionally, though not directly present in the discussion, the works and ideas of John Gaddis prove to be a polarizing force in the debate. Gaddis and others decry the post-modern turn in diplomatic history. The criticisms run as follows – the influence of postmodernism has led some historians to neglect archives focusing too resolutely on theory while simultaneously allowing their own political beliefs to warp their scholarly attentions. Leffler furthers this criticism suggesting that though race and gender need to be incorporated into diplomatic histories, postmodern historians have taken the two categories too far in isolation, causing fragmentation and loss of synthesis. Calling for greater integration of political economy, geopolitics, culture, ideology, and gender, Leffler clearly wishes to expand the scope of diplomatic history while maintaining a sense of cohesion. Rather than see the postmodern as a challenge or threat, Leffler appears to view its value as a complimentary force.

In contrast, Michael H. Hunt notes the defensive crouch many in the field seem to have taken. According to Hunt, diplomatic historians have felt the criticism of their “antiquated” methodology (too much focus on elites and nation-states) and lack of theory. Regarding the fragmentation of the field, Hunt locates three general practitioners. First, the realist – state as the central unit/historical actor, a downplaying of economic and cultural factors with a tent to exhibit national-gender-class bias in part due to the privileging of elites in research. Pre-occupied with the nation state and archives (apparently guilty of not reading sources “against the grain” or considering the inherent biases of archives themselves), realists allow state policy and the like to occupy to much territory at the expense of other equally important factors., “Perhaps the most troubling of realism’s deficiencies are its questionable categories of analysis and its ahistorical interpretive themes.” Second, Hunt identifies the “progress tradition” which in turn birthed the corporatist approach (which editor Michael Hogan helped to establish). Such a methodology attempted to connect domestic policy with foreign policy. One of the earliest examples of this tactic remains William Appleman Williams The Tragedy of American Diplomacy . (16) The Progressive tradition never coalesced into a single group but rather splintered into three separate branches with corporatism becoming one its most prominent strains. (17) Finally, the rise of the internationalist school marks to a great extent the transnational turn in diplomatic history. A highly pluralistic formulation, the international approach encourages the incorporation of cultural factors in analysis and proves especially good at revealing “the pervasiveness and dangers of ethnocentrism in historical writing no less than in policymaking.” (18) Moreover, “the very diversity of this international research agenda has given rise to a rich array of interpretive frameworks and research strategies. The best known of these is the multiarchival approach to US relations with the other Great Powers … [others] have stressed the importance of the transmission and impact overseas of American popular culture and of the hegemony of U.S. media.” (19) Like other writers, Hunt concludes that diplomatic history must take into account non-US state centered perspectives. (20)

Addressing the ambition of Williams while adhereing to the concerns of Leffler, Thomas Bender Paul Kramer and others have pursued distinctly transnational approaches, while also attempting to account for issues of gender and race. (21) For example, Kramer’s The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, and the Philippines rejects tropes of U.S. exceptionalism suggesting U.S. imperial policies followed a similar trajectory to those of their imperial predecessors. Moreover, Kramer’s multiarchival approach provides a transnational perspective that reasserts some of Williams’ key arguments among them that U.S. efforts remained driven by economic concerns. Finally, Kramer’s work presents a colonial situation that grants agency to Filipinos while illustrating the role of local elites many of whom collaborated and others who resisted (though in fairness resistance probably emerged to a much greater degree among non-elites/non-Christian Filipinos).

The Philippines have long endured the interference of imperial powers. After U.S. forces helped to drive the Spanish out, some believed a new era of independence had begun to emerge; only to be thrown down the rabbit hole of “informal empire” by American forces until after WWII. Along the winding path to self-determination, Filipinos themselves negotiated imperial spaces/logics, accepted U.S. racial formations, and the “politics of representation” only to find that American policy makers continued to vascillate on the issue of independence finally granting Filipinos their autonomy negatively, as protectionist economics and racial nativism combined to create an independence lobby that failed to see Filipinos as equals but rather as interlopers and degenerate peoples that threatened American finance and culture.

Kramer’s work spans the later stages of Spain’s collapse to the 1930s. The Blood of Government clearly illustrates the efforts of US imperialists who consciously promoted the martial skills of Filipino allies during the Spanish American War only to turn on them following its conclusion, presenting them as an unreliable and childlike military force in need of guidance.

Interestingly, Kramer attempts to explore the emerging illustrado diaspora/existence. The creation of the steamship and Spain’s willingness to allow some Filipinos to migrate to the metropole and other regions, created a diaspora that privileged its cosmopolitanism, envisioning a central role in the administration of an independent Philippines. The Blood of Government places special focus on the work of native writers in all periods whom engaged in a multivalent process of refuting imperial claims, sometimes harnessing them for their own particular uses (22) while creating a “Filipino” identity. (23) Perhaps one of the most dominant intellectual figures, and one whose interpretation varied with the time period was Jose Alonzo y Rizal whose early works resonated with ilustrados whom embraced his ideas as their own. Ultimately, nearly all Filipinos would come to claimed him at one time or another for their various causes. Rizal paradoxically even found acceptance from US officials in the 20th century.
Much of American policy and relations between Filipinos and policy makers rested on what Kramer argues were the “politics of recognition,” in which American acknowledged the ilustrado population and its “capabilities” as “little Brown Brothers” under the rubric of “Benevolent Assimilation” meaning that US officials would recognize ilustrado power/significance of the moment while waiting to bestow on them formal independence when they illustrated the requisite characteristics. One of the many problems with such formulations rests in the fact that though Filipino elites managed some control over representation, the interpretation of such ideas remains relatively uncontrolled, thus later when the St. Louis World’s Fair of 1903 displayed a Filipino exhibit that highlighted the non-Christian aspects of the archipelago, some Americans drew the wrong conclusion, disappointing US officials and ilustrados alike. This familial form of inclusionary racism competed with evolutionary, and tutelage tropes all justifying US occupation. Each enabled the US to present itself as a benevolent informal empire . Here Kramer seems to embrace Williams in that this seems to be the rub in The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, an inability to locate the frailties or corruption of such an approach. Controlling the post war Philippines meant engaging ilustrados, convincing them “that they were “brothers” and not “serfs” and simultaneously explain to them why they were unready for the rigors and responsibilities of self-government. U.S. officials also had to be able to explain to racist anti-imperialists why the assimilation of Filipinos would be successful and post no threat to the United States itself. The result was an inclusionary racial formation that brought metaphors of family (24), evolution (25), and tutelary assimilation into a gradualist, indeed indefinite, trajectory of Filipino “progress” toward self-government.” (26) Throughout the long occupation, US policymakers constantly balanced the need to convince Filipinos of their intentions while convincing hostile elements domestically that its annexation/incorporation proved no threat. Moreover, US attempts to cloak empire as “informal” depended on the participation of Filipino elites such that “the politics of recognition was especially attractive to collaborating elites who could both follow its stipulations and employ them to accelerate or delay the counterimperial transfer of sovereignty in ways that bolstered their own power.” (27) Collaboration both provided the cover and hierarchies for imperial control but also hid the permanence of occupation behind this tacit agreement between elites and US officials. Additionally, this collaboration along with what Kramer labels “fiesta politics” would not have been feasible within the continental U.S. as the St. Louis World’s fair ruckus illustrated. Race relations in the Philippines, though obviously paternalistic and discriminatory, in many ways exceeded those of America’s mainland.

As Kramer argues in his introduction, one of the innovations that The Blood of Government provides involves the transnational character of US- Filipino relations. Kramer continually illustrates how domestic events in the United States come to bear on the Philippines. More than the thoughts/concerns of policymakers emerge; Kramer illustrates the influence of California’s harsh nativist movement on labor and broader immigration issues. Additionally, domestic agricultural producers by the 1920s viewed the Philippines as a competitor, lobbying for its independence. Ironically, independence came not as a result of US acknowledgement of “progress” or “capability” (28) but as the culmination of racial nativism and agribusiness/labor protectionism. Racial exclusion developed as the primary catalyst for Filipino independence., an independence that was signed in 1932 but in reality delayed true autonomy for nearly 10 years.

Another of Kramer’s key points regards the effect such racial formulations had on Filipinos and the U.S. Few in the US, racist anti-imperialists being an exception perhaps, recognized the multi-directional nature of empire. The uni-directional approach that so many assumed found itself foundering on increased immigration to the United States as racial nativists viewed this migration hostilely as part of the “third wave” of Asian invasion (obviously nativists failed to distinguish between different nationalities/ethnicities within Asian culture hence the “Asian invasion” trope). The sexual threat that Filipino men represented to their white counterparts sparked violence and in some cases death. Of course, this sort of sexual fear drove many nativists of the period. Moreover, Filipinos of the 1930s and 1940s had been raised under “benevolent assimilation” which cast American in idealistic and unrealistic terms. The history of struggle against American forces no longer existed (erasure through education) such that Filipino immigrants to the US articulated a sanitized version of US-Philippines history, while remaining shocked at the overt racism that few American educators in the Philippines bothered to mention. Additionally, as has been mentioned, decades of colonial nationalism and an inclusionary racial formation, encouraged elites to adopt similar mechanisms of control, replacing the former U.S. hierarchies with their own that privileged Christian Filipinos over others comparing its non-Christian/Muslim/Animist counterparts as akin to Native Americans, meaning Filipino elites played the role of white imperialist.

The only real criticism one might profer here remains that though he discusses the non-Christian peoples of the Philippines, he never really explains who they are, what they do. Granted it would seem they remain a primarily agrarian society but is that how they were or simply how they were envisioned/portrayed? Do they have a voice? Kramer gets at neither of these issues, only acknowledging the marginalization of such groups. Still, though significant, it fails to undermine the work, which ambitiously traces the transnational history of US-Filipino relations.

== Gender and Sexuality ==

Joan Scott’s “Gender as a Useful Category of Analysis” did not initiate the shift toward gender as an analytic, but it brought the practice to a greater audience. The utility of using gender to reveal power relations through language and symbols such as the gendered discourse around imperialism merged with transnational approaches to reevaluate U.S. colonialism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Theorists such as Michele Foucault and Edward Said emerged as clear influences shifting historian’s attentions to discourse, cultural production, and structure. Said’s insight that Western portrayals of the East reveled much more about the West than its object of attention, has found numerous practitioners.
In this new framework, the tentacles of imperialism still reach far and wide but the consequences of imperial expansion extend to imperial powers. The resulting effects often emerge in numerous ways, not least among them in cultural production. Focusing on the cultural productions of popular fiction, film, media, and recognized authors, Amy Kaplan’s The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture challenges the “traditional understanding of imperialism as a one way imposition of power in distant colonies” calling attention to “ambiguities and contradictions of imperial relations in the formation of national culture.” (29) Kaplan explores the influence of international struggles for imperial domination on “representations of American national identity at home,” (30) meaning that “domestic metaphors of national identity” remain connected to “renderings of the foreign and the alien.” (31)

Kaplan opens with debates over Puerto Rico’s status noting how numerous leaders feared bringing the island nation into the national sphere because of its nonwhite population. Rather than view the Puerto Rico case in the context of the international, Kaplan points out that it eventual inclusion as a territory related to concerns over degradation to U.S. citizenry and family. The eventual solution made Puerto Ricans “foreign” in the “domestic sense” much like Blacks under Jim Crow. (32) By doing so, the U.S. made American imperialism a legitimate defensive act. Not necessarily in the case of Puerto Rico, but more broadly, American officials justified imperial ambitions as a means to protect U.S. interests and “defend/save” a weaker nation from anarchy. (33) Racialized discourse served as a central theme in the debates, however , “racialized analogies that empire deployed at home and abroad created dissonance as well as resonance, as they mutually defined and destabilized one another.” (34) The “nightmare” of imperialism ironically related to its successes, the further the U.S. pushed outwards the more it would have to find ways to incorporate non-white peoples which introduced the foreign, removing the domestic. Imperialism served to disrupt the imperial power in numerous ways, “’the anarchy of empire’ … suggests ways of thinking about imperialism as network of power relations that changes over space and time and is riddled with instability, ambiguity, and disorder, rather than as a monolithic system of domination that the every word ‘empire’ implies.” (35) The more America expanded its exceptionalism to the world the more it shattered the “coherence of national identity, as the boundaries that distinguish it from the outside world promise to collapse.” (36)

The Anarchy of Empire notably attempts to juxtapose imperial expansion with domestic debates over Jim Crow, segregation, slavery and Reconstruction. It also utilizes gender as a lens through which to explore the various ways masculinity and femininity served to legitimize expansion. For women, as numerous historians have noted, imperial adventure provided a space for their civilizing influence. Domesticity as promoted through imperial adventure, “extended not only to racially foreign subjects inside and outside the home, but also to the interiority of female subjectivity …” (37) By extending the “female sphere”, it no longer remained a bounded or rigidly ordered interior space. Domesticity’s double meaning as an interior home space and a domesticating of the wild fit well into imperial ambitions, if men’s actions drove imperialism, women’s innate moralism legitimized its results, “Not a retreat from the masculine sphere of empire building, domesticity both reenacts and conceals its origin in the violent appropriation of foreign land.” . (38)

Mark Twain emerges as one of Kaplan’s central foils. For Kaplan, Twain’s interest lay in his relation to America through empire or as Kaplan argues, “In his journey to Hawaii in 1866, Twain both displaced and discovered the origins of his own divided national identity at the intersecting global routes of slavery and empire.” (39) Kaplan’s Twain found his “homespun” qualities woven from “the tangled threads of imperial travel …. Twain’s career writing, and reception as a national author were shaped by … the routes of transnational travel, enabling and enabled by the changing borders of imperial expansion.” (40) While visiting Hawaii, Twain appeared consumed by death and disease. He recognizes the devastation brought to natives via European disease but often engages in various forms of erasure that cloak the imperial history. Kaplan suggests Twain engaged in imperial nostalgia “the longing to salvage an imagined pristine, pre-colonial culture by the same agents of empire – missionaries, anthropologists, travel writers – who have had a hand in destroying it. Imperialist nostalgia disavows the history of violence that yokes the past to the present.” (41) Imperial nostalgia might free Twain from considering the interconnections between empire and slavery. Though attempting to erase or forget much of the imperial history surrounding him, Twain remained keenly aware of the economic issues that might benefit US interests promoting a steamship line to Hawaii and its sugar production. American intervention for Twain served “as liberation from the stranglehold of Old World empires, Twain represented Hawaii as a passive arena and lucrative reward for the contest between American and European powers in the Pacific.” (42) Feminizing Europe and masculinizing America left indigenous Hawaiians void, non-actors in their own history. Hawaiian women occupy spaces in Twains mind relating equally to disease, death, and sexual licentiousness. For Kaplan Twain’s views on native women “turns both the bodies of native women and the remains of the dead into exotic sites for the projection of colonial desire, sites apparently frozen in time and divorced form the historical struggles over colonization in which his journey is enmeshed. Twain’s eroticization of Hawaii renders colonial desire as a kind of necrophilia.” (43) The displacement of responsibility for the spread of disease is neatly reassigned to native women rather the European missionaries and explorers. In the history of colonial struggle, Twain could not resist connecting such travails as reflective of America’s recent difficulties with slavery. In his later writings, Hawaii remained a central factor in how Twain confronted the “legacy of slavery in post-Reconstruction America and the history of imperialism and capitalist development abroad.” (44)

Theodore Roosevelt and the “yellow press” emerge no less unscathed. Though crediting newspapers for exciting American desires for war in 1898, Kaplan redirects her examination to look at film and the historical novels of the 1890s. Imperial films provided a way to create a linear narrative form with images. For natives this meant erasure, invisibility, and incompetence as nonwhite forces found themselves portrayed as lazy, incompetent or simply vacant. Just as “spectacle” had been a necessary aspect of imperialism’s gendered civilizing process (men had to compete or struggle under the feminine gaze to give both meaning in the imperial context), films provided audiences ways to view and think about imperialism and its occupied subjects. Viewing the films themselves removed women and others from their domestic spheres, “If the spectacle of war provided a safe way for women to enter a public sphere of global mobility, in turn the oppositional potential of this public sphere might have been harnessed and disciplined by the activity of watching war films.” (45) Teddy Roosevelt realized the importance of spectacle in his attack on San Juan Hill. Reports that black soldiers saved his rough riders from certain annihilation received at best a lukewarm response from the future president. To illustrate this mentality, Kaplan explores Roosevelt’s paternalist attitudes toward black soldiers. He acknowledges them as Americans subordinating them to second class status. Film and media reports obscured Cuban agency as native actors were ignored or portrayed as detached, non-participants in their own war of liberation (this has to do with U.S. formulations that suggested only the U.S. could have successful orderly revolution, that US imperialism brought law and stability to such regions). Kaplan carefully points out that not all colonial subjects and minorities received monolithic treatment by men such as Roosevelt, “Roosevelt … suffered a double vision: on the one hand identifying African Americans with, and on the other hand differentiating them from, the imagined unassimulable Cubans, Filipinos, and Puerto Ricans.” (46) Kaplan also illustrates a cruel ironic twist to such excursions. Though Blacks found themselves unfairly racialized and discriminated against, several leaders suggested that military service would gain Blacks equal citizenship, among them W.E.B. DuBois. In this way, like Williams and as will be examined Alison Sneider, Kaplan locates the importance of expansion for America’s internally oppressed peoples and their claim to citizenship. Extending Williams argument regarding foreign policy as a salve for domestic ills, Sneider and Kaplan illustrate reformers perceptions of expansion as way to reform US while reinforcing gender and racial roles. Simultaneously women and blacks used the same imperialism to prove their citizenship leading to countervailing forces in which some suffragists, as clearly conveyed by Sneider, employed racist arguments to justify their own right to vote. Essentially, newer works have applied gender analytics and a cultural approach in order to reveal the connectedness of domestic hopes and foreign policy efforts.

Like the efforts of Kaplan and Sneider, Laura Briggs work Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex, Science, and U.S. Imperialism in Puerto Rico connects colonial histories to that of domestic issues affecting imperial powers, “colonialism was not something that happened ‘over there,’ with little or no effect on the internal dynamics and culture of the imperial power itself …. On the contrary, colonialism has had a profound effect on the culture and policy of the mainland.” (47) Gender and sexuality serve as critical lens from which to examine ideas of citizenship (for both mainland Americans and Puerto Ricans), the impact of colonial policy on American domestic policies, and the symbolism of Puerto Rican bodies themselves in the imagery of nationhood/citizenship.

As with other recent histories, the nation state does not serve as Briggs fundamental unit of analysis. Rather Briggs traces developments in sexual regulation across empires and regions. Sexual regulation of women did not rise and fall with the American Empire. Rather Briggs carefully traces the transnational developments between empires and colonies that provided the foundation of future U.S. policies from the nineteenth century British Contagious Disease Acts to the segregated districts of American cities in the early decades of the 20th century. Reproducing Empire argues that an international policy of prostitution regulation developed in these years. Subsequently, it became very easy for venereal disease to be associated with such occupations and the populations officials believed practiced. Thus, the conflation with disease not only with the visible “other” but also with swamps and tropical locations fed ideas about the promiscuity and diseased nature of native women.

As with the Sneider’s Suffragists in an Imperial Age, Briggs locates the influence of women’s groups/associations such as the WTCU and the LNA (Ladies National Association) in Puerto Rico and what that meant not only for natives of the Island but also Americans domestically. This space enabled women to take a visible role in the public sphere domestically and in Puerto Rico but also promoted the interests of Puerto Rican elites as the WCTU allied itself with local ladies clubs of patrician cast. It also sparked debates about citizenship, “As in other empires, U.S. prostitution policy on the island was tremendously important area of debate over the nature of colonial modernity and the struggle over the meaning of Puerto Rican citizenship took place specifically with reference to prostitution.” (48) The comparison with Kaplan’s moral and civilizing women seems obvious though Briggs produces evidence not from cultural production but sociological surveys, medical reports, and other more traditional social history oriented sources.

Critically, Briggs notes that jailing convicted prostitutes began in the colonies such that by 1918, the practice appeared stateside in numerous metropolitan areas. Moreover, the WTCU participated in the incarceration of prostitutes in both the Philippines and Puerto Rico. At the same time, these jails were recast as “hospitals” soon after several U.S. cities (following WWI) established similar institutions notably San Francisco, San Diego, and New York. (49) Puerto Rican elites and the colonial government combined to enact programs of regulation. Such attempts helped to solidify what Briggs argues “would become a constant feature of Puerto Rican politics: from eugenics to population policy to sterilization, the sexuality and reproduction of poor women would become the battleground – symbolic and real – for the meaning of the U.S. presence in Puerto Rico.” (50) Like Kramer’s Filipino elites and ilustrados, Puerto Rican upper classes collaborated with the colonial government for both political power and to exert some amount of control over their representation via U.S. officials.

What all this meant for the domestic U.S. becomes concrete as mainland migrations continued. The colonial government’s utilization of the discourse of gender to intervene in the lives of working class Puerto Ricans provides a “genealogy of the demonization of poor women in the welfare reform debates of 1994-97.” (51) Thus, Briggs illustrates that such approaches melded easily with the social science discourse (Oscar Lewis, Daniel Patrick Moynahan) that emerged over the same period stateside.

As the academic discourse came to dominate discussions about the regulation of female bodies, Cold War concerns imposed themselves on U.S. policy, “Third World women’s sexual behavior was rendered dangerous and unreasonable, the cause of poverty and hence of communism and needed to be made known, managed, and regulated.” (52) Briggs certainly suggests that the work of social scientists did as much to obscure issues/individuals while perpetuating negative and often inaccurate conclusions.

Another aspect of Briggs’ argument regards the development of the birth control pill. Tropes concerning Puerto Rico and the Third World generally conflated the global south with overpopulation, “Overpopulation provided a sociological explanation for Third World poverty, one that denied a role for international capitalism or colonialism in producing these conditions.” (53) Similar fears surfaced in Puerto Rico helping to enable large pharmecutical companies to invest in and develop the birth control pill. As Briggs argues, fears of overpopulation created the ethical space to justify such experimentation, “Reproductive research produced the pill as a specific technological fix to the Third World problem of overpopulation. In doing so, it rendered the account of overpopulation as more plausible by associating it with science and technological solutions at the height of the Cold War belief in them.” (54)

Finally, Briggs’ work refutes previous arguments that suggest the colonial government imposed “forced sterilization”. Instead, Briggs’ offers evidence (sociological studies/surveys, financial information as in defunding) that some women requested the operation and few reported complaints. However, Briggs cautions that “it is not an argument that working class women chose to be sterilized , it is an argument that there is no evidence that there was a representative campaign to force them.” (55) In connection with sterilization and larger birth control debates, Briggs points to a fundamental problem that mainland feminists faced. Nationalist pro-independence groups promoted natalism while the colonial government encouraged sterilization. As Briggs notes, despite the best intentions, feminists could not escape the “terms of U.S. national, colonial, and racial discourse … when mainland feminists … accepted the nationalist version of the subaltern – the women are victimized – while rejecting or ignoring the perspective of feminists like those in Pro Familia as duped, bourgeois pawns of colonialism, they accepted a pro-natalist anti-feminism because it carried the banner of the subaltern.” (56) U.S. anti-colonialists “demanded that the only ‘authentic natives’ were those that could occupy the position of the ‘people’. Puerto Rican feminists failed to fit the bill because they were middle class professionals and intellectuals who differed with charismatic nationalist leaders.” (57)

In dialogue with Briggs, Kaplan, and others, Allison Sneider’s Suffragists in an Imperial Age: U.S. Expansionism and the Woman Question 1870-1929 combines two burgeoning fields in United States history circles. As with Briggs and Kaplan, Sneider utilizes the analytical category of gender in a transnational appraisal, exploring the domestic effects driven by American imperial and territorial expansion of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By incorporating rhetorical devices that articulated the need to enfranchise women in developing territories, Suffragists created a space for discussing the expansion of voting rights as a federal obligation despite the persistent trope of state rights and self sovereignty put forth at the time.

Expansionism reoriented American politics in numerous ways. Sneider traces debates around the incorporation/possible incorporation of the Dominican Republic, Utah, Hawaii and Puerto Rico among others and their relation to women’s suffrage. Post Reconstruction, the Federal government abdicated much of its responsibility to enforce equal voting rights for minorities, allowing states’ rights advocates to dominate such debates. However, imperial expansion forced the federal government to acknowledge “colonial subjects” and others, determining their present and future status. Women’s suffragists learned from each experience, tailoring arguments such that they maintained a consistent dialogue around enfranchisement and the federal government’s necessary role in such processes.

At times, suffragists marshaled the language of race and citizenship. For example, when advocating voting rights for women living in U.S. possessions, suffragist leadership argued they required the vote due to the threat presented by male counterparts in such territories, “such women, even more than those of our own States will need the ballot as a means of self-protection.” (58) Hawaii’s entrance into the United States polity illustrated such debates, “The Hawaiian Appeal was not aimed only at white women in the territory. Couched in the rhetoric of protection for native Hawaiian women, the petition merged views about native men’s savagery and notions of essential womanly virtues across races to make a case for native and white women’s voting rights.” (59) Similarly, in earlier periods, U.S. Native American policy proved equally influential. Expanding citizenship rights to American Indians influenced ideas about gender, masculinity, and voting as an inherent right of membership. Incorporating Native American populations into the citizenry represented a potential framework for moving “dependent” women into similar status. Race and citizenship emerged as factors but “to suffragists … Indians were noble savages whose plight at once elicited sympathy and disdain.” (60) Extending voting rights to newly incorporated Native American men suggested that voting existed as a right of citizenship, an idea that many suffragists promoted. In this way, one might connect U.S. imperial policies as an extension of the nation’s internal colonization of Native Americans, illustrating an historical continuity often neglected in previous histories.

In comparison, Utah’s Mormon population presented obstacles to national legislators but for religious reasons. Though some suffragists used anti-Catholic arguments in other contexts to support expanding the vote to protestant women, in the case of Utah political maneuvering proved more nuanced. Some avoided the topic, “by 1878 woman suffrage in Utah territory had become an embarrassment for the suffrage movement because of the way polygamy linked votes for women and sexual scandal in the public mind.” (61) The Mormon example “would have far more salience for the political fate of woman suffrage than would the Indian question.” (62) Ultimately, Western expansion and imperial designs forced legislators into uncomfortable debates that pushed both Republicans and Democrats to contort their usual political logic regarding rights and citizenship, but suffragists like Susan B. Anthony realized, “the politics of territorial expansion made clear that under certain circumstances the physical expansion of national borders could reconfigure the gendered boundaries of political space ….” (63)

Though suffragist appeals failed to win over a majority of Congressional legislature, these attempts at enlarging the voting public reformed colonial policies which in turn affected domestic ones., “in the context of U.S. empire, attaching women suffrage amendments to the governing bills for U.S. territory helped suffragists and their legislative allies squash the state’s rights framework that had circumscribed suffragists activities for decades.” (64) Whether or not, voting rights became an essential aspect of citizenship remained debatable but from an international perspective suffragists had at least established that “political rights for women” were added to the list that marked proper civilization. In this way, Sneider illustrates Kaplan’s point that women served to legitimize expansion and empire. Sneider’s work speaks directly to the previously noted Kaplans and Briggs, though more domestic in nature. If The Tragedy of American Diplomacy opened up space for new ways of envisioning U.S. “diplomatic history”, Sneider, Kaplan, Briggs and others moved beyond Williams strictly economic approach infusing their works with more cultural aspects along with the aforementioned turns to transnationalism and gender.

Of course rather than think of gender and sexuality as separate but related categories, one might consider ways to link them more directly through a categorization such as “intimacy”. The collection of essays Haunted By Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History examines the intimate relations between colonizer and colonized traversing across the colonial frontier including Samoa, the Philippines, Australia, and the interior U.S. Colonial projects long attempted to control the “desires” of both ruler and ruled. This history of relations reveals the structure and power dynamic of colonization, its attempts at defining race, and the resistance against such impositions.

Looking to the historiographies of North American history and post colonial studies, Editor Ann Stoler et al delves into the history of intimacy and its sites of interaction. Stoler’s introduction “Intimidations of Empire: Predicaments of the Tactile and Unseen” offers an explanation for Haunted’s approach, “This volume summons these insights to work through – and push on – a basic set of premises: that matters of the intimate are critical sites for the consolidation of colonial power, that management of those domains provides a strong pulse on how relations of empire drive states.” (65) Viewing government through the “microphysics of daily lives has redirected historians to new readings of familiar archives and to new genres of documentation. It has changed how we read ….” (66)
In her second essay, “Tense and Tender Ties: The Politics of Comparison in North American and (Post) Colonial Studies”, Stoler acknowledges that Williams’ lament that U.S. historiography ignored empire no longer held true. Moreover, Stoler applauds Amy Kaplan for noting three phenomena in academic circles, “an absence of culture from the study of U.S. imperialism, an absence of empire from the study of American culture, and an absence of the United States from postcolonial studies of empire.” (67) However, Stoler departs from Kaplan arguing The Anarchy of Empire reflected an older historiography which it rightly appraised, but a new “generation of social historians, historical anthropologists and students of American culture have begun to” address such concerns. Paul Kramer’s essay on the U.S. colonial government’s regulation of prostitution illustrates a striking similarity to the policies of Brigg’s Puerto Rico, each historian using an “illicit” intimacy to explore colonial issues. Nayan Shah’s “Adjudicating Intimacies on U.S. Frontiers “explores two meanings of intimacy [which] calibrate liberal societies’ legal definitions of the capacity of self-possession and for the ownership of property. “ (68) Shah’s essay explores the juridical aspect of intimacy’s interpretation by authorities, ““Hindu marriage had different consequences in the sodomy and estate cases. In the first, the status of ‘‘Hindu marriage’’ helped commute a convicted man’s sentence from a serious charge; and, in the second, the legitimacy of a ‘‘Hindu marriage’’ determined the inheritance of valuable agricultural property. Despite different legal outcomes, both cases unleashed broader questions about the legitimacy and illegitimacy of marital ties.” (69) Lisa Lowe’s “The Intimacies of Four Continents” addresses three meanings of intimacy: the first a reference to spatial proximity, the second “more common one of privacy, often configured as conjugal and familial relations in the bourgeois home, distinguished from the public realm of work, society, and politics,” and third, “the sense of intimacies embodied in the variety of contacts among slaves, indentured persons, and mixed-blood free peoples living together on the islands that resulted in ‘‘the collision of European, African, and Asian components within the [Caribbean] Plantation, that could give rise to rebellions against the plantation structure itself.’’ (70) Through this framework, Lowe argues that historians have another avenue from which “to discuss a world division of labor emerging in the nineteenth century.” (71)

How much this collection attends to more traditional political and economic histories proves the divide between John Lewis Gaddis and the contributors to Haunted By Empire. However, Stoler encourages historians to move away from nation-state formations, “Rather than compare United States empire with a host of others, we might imagine nineteenth century history as made up not of nation-building projects alone but of compounded colonialisms and as shaped by multinational philanthropies, missionary movements, discourses of social welfare and reform, and traffics in people (women in particular) that ran across state-archived paper trails.” (72) Still, as noted in its introduction, this new analytic approach opened new archives, new sources, and new ways of reading into the field. Several of the contributors employ theoretical frameworks reminiscent of Foucault and Said. In many ways, Haunted By Empire attends to the very concerns of Leffler and others. It employs numerous archives, utilizes theoretical frameworks, but it probably lacks the traditional arena of elites. One might suggest it explores discourse and structure simultaneously through the eyes working class and sub-altern peoples.

== Cold War ==

William Appleman Williams suggested that American-Soviet diplomatic efforts collapsed into mutual recrimination and distrust, that they did so resulted because of American intransience. George Kennan and others promoted a zero sum contest for global influence that served to force Soviet’s into hostile responses. Even with the Marshall plan, Williams argues, policymakers never truly intended to extend its economic support to Eastern bloc nations. However, contemporary historians Odd Arne Westad and Jermey Suri build upon and diverge from Williams’ main arguments, while infusing their work with a transnational bent and multiarchival research. Additionally, each author, though not as theoretical as works by Briggs, Kramer, or Kaplan, applies theoretical frameworks to their histories.

Jeremu Suri’s Power and Protest: Global Revolution and the Rise of Detente dissolves the division between foreign and domestic policies, recasting Cold War hostilities and diplomatic maneuvering as conservative power play between the United States, USSR, and China. Like Immanuel Wallerstein, Suri argues that the promises of communism, capitalism, and charismatic leaders such as Charles De Gaulle failed to come to fruition, causing domestic dissent and cynicism. Accordingly, foreign policy conflicts, agreements and summits often reflected each respective national government’s attempt to curry favor with its citizens often because of internal discord. Provocatively, Suri reevaluates détente, suggesting this foreign policy “breakthrough” actually fed conservative forces, providing China, the USSR, and US a means to illustrate success to their citizens while refocusing their security concerns toward internal dissent. If Williams’ policymakers feared any sort of social revolution abroad pre-1968, Suri argues events of that same year led U.S. and European officials to target social revolutions within their own societies. Thus, fear of foreign revolutions collapsed domestically into a phobia of internal dissent.

For much of the book’s first half, Suri traces U.S. nuclear policy from the last days of the Second World War into the early 1970s. From the outset, supporting Williams’ claims of U.S. belligerence, United States diplomats utilized the threat of nuclear war often in negotiations with the USSR, a policy that did receive internal criticism but ultimately President Truman chose to disregard such dissent. The early animosity of US/Soviet relation increased tensions between the two nations. However, Suri argues that by Eisenhower’s presidency the construction of nuclear arsenal served to assure a domestic audience rather than an international one. (73) Eisenhower’s “farewell address” in which he warned the nation of the military industrial complex bearing influence over American government reflected the “failure of his nuclear strategy.” Nuclear deterrence also failed to ease international tensions while making them more “permanent.” JFK lacked Eisenhower’s misgivings (74) embracing the frontier thesis logic of Frederick Jackson Turner seeking to spread economic development and U.S. ideals through foreign policy, “Anxious to find recipients for its aid, the White House expanded its fiscal contributions to anticommunist leaders in poor countries.” (75) Again, Suri and Williams point to similar conclusions regarding the logic beyond U.S. expansion.

Much of Power and Protest pays special attention to the efforts of nation’s like France or China to elude the control of either of the world’s superpowers. Suri juxtaposes Mao Ze Dong, West Germany’s Adennuer, and Charles De Gaulle. De Gaulle and Mao receive special attention because of their appeal to charismatic leadership that at once rejected approaches taken by US and Soviet governments but fell victim to similar vulnerabilities, namely the promise of greater rewards upon which they and others, failed to deliver. De Gaulle and Mao prove an interesting comparison. Each tried to locate power outside of institutions, if De Gaulle appealed to the idea of grandeur to evade traditional French bureaucratic and institutional power, Mao lacked the infrastructure for national uniform reforms, thus he harnessed the public, students mostly, as a revolutionary Red Guard. In regard to nuclear weapons, Suri offers a compelling insight, that both France and China pursued nuclear power as an attempt to gain a stronger foothold within the alliances they resided for France NATO and the West and for China, the USSR.

Another “innovations” in Power and Protest remains its attentions to the transnational nature of issues in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. Suri moves between the USSR, Europe, China, and the United States, revealing the unique but similar domestic troubles suffered by each in the late 1960s. The writers of the period including William F. Buckley, Herbert Marcuse, Daniell Bell, Wu Han, and Alexander Solyzheniztian provided the arguments for and the language of “dissent”. Some theorists most notably Marcuse looked abroad for inspiration later applauding aspects of Mao’s Cultural Revolution. American and European student protesters, utilizing state funded educational infrastructures (all created through governments from the USSR to America investing in education, health, and so on.) to organize the various movements. Similarly, Mao’s efforts spun out of control. Though Suri portrays Mao’s efforts as boomeranging back on the Chinese government, he postulates a similar formation in the West. All these student revolts resulted in a shift regarding security. States prioritized the control and stability of their populations over external threats. Within this frame, Suri views much of the international political maneuvering of arms control and the like as more about domestic concerns than international conflagrations. Of course, this shift further alienated citizens, creating a general cynicism found in all of the societies Suri examines. Again, Wallerstein locates the same problem at the same time in Decline of American Power but he fails to account for China.

Suri’s interpretation of the logic behind détente deserves attention. Pointing out divisions between China and the USSR along with American efforts to exploit these conflicts, Suri reevaluates the logic of détente. The USSR (especially in its satellite states such as Poland, Czechoslovakia), China, and the US all suffered from visible internal dissent. By the 1970s, Nixon felt mounting pressure to silence or diminish such outbursts, much of the same could be said of the USSR (Brezhnev Doctrine), East/West Germany (Ostopolitik) and China. In these evaluations, Suri does well to illustrate that though the USSR and Chinese governments did severely limit individual rights, citizens in each found ways to protest or press the system for change. One might suggest that this enables the people’s of such communist states to illustrate agency previously denied them. According to Suri, détente between the USSR and US never diminished nuclear arsenals, rather it simply placed limits on production, therefore stockpiles continued to grow. (76) Though a tenuous peace emerged, it locked the “social and political status quo” into place, normalizing such antagonisms. For example, in regard to Sino-US relations, Suri astutely points out that “Foreign policy “normalization” between China and the United States was an important part of their internal “normalization”. Mao, Zhou, Nixon and Kissinger, and their successor used improved relations to limit troubling external commitments and assure international stability. At home the gains in Sino-American rapproachment reduced the influence of inherited ideologies advocated by radical groups – the Red Guards, the New Left, and the new Right.” (77)

Suri’s work clearly illustrates a transnational “collective sensibility”. His framing certainly behooves his argument, the same issues and problems in admittedly different contexts emerged across China, Europe, the US, and the Soviet Union. He also does well to present US and USSR concerns about the benefits of a bipolar world. Détente served to consolidate their power internationally. Clearly, nations such as West Germany, France, Czechoslovakia, and Poland wished to escape the pervasive influence of the superpowers.

As with Suri, Odd Arne Westad’s The Global Cold War – Interventions and the Making of Our Times examines the Cold War and its actors from numerous vantage points but focuses especially on those of Third World powers negotiating the complex terrain of diplomacy. More than anything, Westad emphasizes the importance of Third World interventions by prominent Cold War powers ( the US, the USSR, China, and Cuba)in determining the future of many developing nations, illustrating the tensions and interplay between communist states. The Global Cold War traces the history of post WWII era interventions from their beginnings in the late 1940s through the Reagan presidency. In terms of breath, Arne traverses Africa, Europe, and much of Asia describing the numerous actors in each intervention.

One of Arne’s key contributions results from new archival sources. This ability to now map the thought of previously shrouded governments enables Arne to more completely explain the rational and logic behind Soviet actions. As well, he clearly illustrates that though a closed police state, with the exception of Stalinist rule, debate and disagreement within leadership circles around foreign policy mattered in regard to decision making just as Congressional debate does in the U.S. This is not to equate one with the other but rather to acknowledge that Soviet leaders felt political pressure and had to address their own nexus of power centers which in turn affected decisions. In this way, Westad further contextualizes insights made by Suri that even though Soviet government reduced freedoms and expression, dissent still surfaced.

Fundamentally, both the US and USSR committed similar errors in its relations with developing nations. Each exuded an arrogance that diminished the political knowledge of the local leaders while applying US/USSR universal templates of development regardless of conditions .(78) Additionally, each nation’s vision of itself suffered from romanticized imaginings of their own national histories that obscured more complex realities that might have served of importance when exporting one’s government.

Though Arne later suggests that the equality between the US and USSR never was truly equal (the US existed as more powerful in nearly every category), each shared a vision of pushing beyond national boundaries, brining modernity. However, their conceptions of modernity differed: the U.S. capitalist individualist form and the USSR’s communal collective based justice oriented ideal. (79)

The tensions within the emerging communist world during the Cold War find clear expression in the context of Third World interventions. Again, like Suri and others, Westad illustrates the lack of unity between Chinese and Russian governments along with the disgruntled nature of Cuba toward its Soviet allies. Castro believed the USSR too passive and compliant in the face of US hegemony. He constantly lobbied for more aid to Third World movements while sending thousands of Cuban soldiers, technicians, teachers, and doctors abroad to help secure revolution in Angola and other developing nations. Also like Suri, Westad acknowledges the interest both the US and USSR had using détente to appease domestic audiences and international communities while each pursued various geopolitical goals in the burgeoning third world. Impressively, Westad also manages to trace the lines of intervention by both US and Soviet leaders individually, thus along with the interactions between fellow communist leaders like Castro and Mao, one grasps a more complex but complete vision of political forces fueling Third World engagement. Moreover, the ebb and flow of each US/USSR success and failures provide testament to the fickle nature of intervention itself, even when it succeeds in the short term it may fail in the long term (Iran) with devastating consequences. (80) The bipolar nature of diplomacy in the period meant that if anti-communism succeeded initially, its failures pushed Third World leaders to consider Marxism and the USSR in later decades, only to disappoint those same developing nations .(81) In this way, one might connect Westad with Suri, who argued that détente and other aspects of the Cold War locked into place peoples and nations. Cold War giants valued stability and control over instability and revolution Westad’s account does dispute this somewhat as he clearly illustrates Soviet efforts to foment revolution in Third World settings. Still, this point maintains some similarity to that of Suri but Power and Protest couches much of its logic around nuclear weapons suggesting that they altered foreign policy in broad and meaningful ways. Détente and arms control were for domestic purposes as much as foreign policy and they maintained an unequal status quo especially for the developing world.

Without a doubt, the Vietnam War served as a symbol of Third World capabilities, inspiring other peoples in developing nations but also leftists and rights movements in Western Europe and America. This example serves the initial purpose of illustrating the transnational nature of identities in this period along with the pervasive influence of Vietnam on the US, USSR, China, and Cuba. Moreover, Westad asserts the transnational nature of ideas when noting that some “revolutionaries” adopted Marxism not at the feet of Russian or Chinese instructors but rather Western European and American intellectual circles while abroad. Once more the connections between Power and Protest and The Global Cold War emerge.

Another key aspect of The Global Cold War involves Reagan era financial shifts. As the rhetoric of market expanded, the US sought to institutionalize its economic systems via international institutions such as the Bretton Woods Conference, the IMF, the World Bank, and others. Though the UN had initially been meant to help propagate American hegemony by the 1970s, the US found hostility more often than influence at the international peace keeping organization. Financial and trade institutions codified loan agreements expectations all resting on free market ideals that few if any of its leaders (most notably the US) ever achieved in their early development. Undoubtedly, this emerged as a key factor in Third World developments, ultimately symbolizing the declining fortunes of the USSR, “their aim was a complete reorientation of both institutions (IMF/World Bank) toward monetarism and market ideology, while as far as possible – using their credit resources to serve US security objectives. Their slogans were conditionality – meaning a domestic and international change toward market solutions as a precondition for assistance – and adjustment – meaning an end to government quotas, subsidies, and very often social spending in the recipient countries under the guidance of IMF experts.” (82) Here Westad reveals ties to Williams who argued that U.S. business interests long sought international institutions they might control for their benefits.

Finally, the rise of Islamism proved an anathema to both the US and USSR. Thought each played a role in the rise of Islamist movements (Afghanistan and Pakistan), both powers viewed their growth warily. The USSR took little comfort in Iran’s 1979 revolution despite its disavowal of US power. Sharing commonalities with Immanuel Wallersten and Jeremy Suri, Westad emphasizes the impact of failed efforts and shattered expectations on movements and peoples. The same disillusionment that drove protest in Suri’s Cold War study, viewed from a similar perspective spurs revolutionaries across the Third World. Westad seems particularly concerned by the ignored status of third world peoples impacted by various interventions. The collapse of communism and end of the Cold War obscured the processes that came before it. New arguments suggesting that maybe the excesses of Vietnam helped lay the foundation for Soviet collapse ignores the devastation wrought by the war while incorrectly assessing its importance. Westad goes to great lengths to illustrate that the USSR’s downfall revolved around its inability keep up with its superpower status, spending money on defense and missiles that its economies could not afford. In fact, the Soviet reforms of glasnost accelerated this process as the failures of Third World interventions found public expression in the “new” Soviet Union. Meanwhile, fellow communists had long since given up on the USSR as a leader in global communism.
Conclusion

William Appleman Williams critique of American foreign policy opened the floodgates for revisionists. The Tragedy of American Diplomacy continues to direct historians today. Critics who chastised Williams for his politics or apparent Marxist beliefs missed the point. Despite Williams naivity regarding communist rule his arguments concerning U.S. policy need not hinge on his political commitments. The Tragedy of American Diplomacy accomplished three tasks 1) it clearly established that U.S. historian failed to account in any meaningful way for empire 2) Williams’ connection of domestic policies/concerns and their relation to foreign policy helped to facilitate the transnational turn that has reawakened the field of diplomatic history over the past three decades and 3) the emphasis on American economic imperialism whether through Open Door efforts or international financial institutions provided a vital continuity regarding American imperial adventures.

From Williams, one easily identifies the various new developments in the field from Amy Kaplan’s culture based study of American colonialism to Haunted by Empire’s study of transnational intimacies to Jeremy Suri and Odd Arne Westad’s Cold War studies. John Lewis Gaddis may decry this as fragmentation while Melvyn Leffler frets over the lack of connection between newer cultural histories and the more traditional politically and economically oriented studies, but one could point at such scholars asking the question, “why have you ignored theory? Why are you so accepting of state sources?” Concerns regarding fragmentation deserve attention. Postmodern historians must engage with archives but not as uncritically as those that came before. Finally, though synthesis holds a definite value, the question remains the motive behind synthesis. Is synthesis a way of bringing all the accumulated knowledge in one place or is it an excuse to once again direct our focus on the nation-state? One hopes it’s the former rather than the latter.

== Notes ==

1. Williams, William Appleman, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 34.

2. Williams, William Appleman, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, 57. Williams identifies four key aspects of this policy on page 57 … 1) “it was neither a military stategy nore a traditional balanced of power policy. It was conceived and designed to win the victories without the wars.” 2) “It was derived from the proposition that America’s overwhelming economic power could cast the economy and the politics of the poorer, weaker, underdeveloped countries in a pro-American mold.” 3) “the policy was neither legalistic nor moralistic in the sense that those criticism are usually offered. It was extremely hard headed and practical.” 4) “unless and until it, and its underlying Weltanschauung, were modified to deal with its own consequences the policy was certain to produce foreign policy crises that would become increasingly severe.”
3. Williams, William Appleman, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, 45.
4. Williams, William Appleman, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, 46.
5. Williams, William Appleman, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, 62.
6. Williams, William Appleman, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, 63. Appleman notes that its economic aspects “coincided with … religious, racist, and reformist drives to remake the world.”

7. Williams, William Appleman, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, 88. “By the time of World War I, therefore, the basic dilemma of American foreign policy was clearly defined. Its generous humanitarianism prompted it to improve the lot of less fortunate peoples, but that side of its diplomacy was undercut by two aspects of its policy. On the one hand, it defined helping people in terms of making them more like Americans. This subverted its ideal of self determination. On the one hand, it asserted and acted upon the necessity of overseas economic expansion for its own material prosperity. But by defining such expansion in terms of markets for American exports, and control of raw materials for American industry, the ability of other peoples to develop and act upon their own patterns of development was undercut.”
8. The idea that international organizations would remain under U.S. leadership
9. Williams, William Appleman, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, 94.
10. Williams, William Appleman, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, 152. “In the 1920s, as well as in the 1960s this modification of policy was brought about by two main considerations. First, new ideas about the nature of American predominance in the Western Hemisphere led different groups in the United States to propose and initiate polity changes. Second, and interacting with the first, the failure of traditional and existing policies to achieve the desired results prompted alterations. Specifically, American polic-makers became convinced by the end of the 1920s that the 21 military interventions undertaken between 1898 and 1924 had not served either to stabilize the region or to institutionalize American power and influence.”
11. Williams, William Appleman, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, 172-3.
12. Williams, William Appleman, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, 272.
13. Williams, William Appleman, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, 278. The United States not only misunderstood the revolutions in economics, politics, color, and anti-colonial nationalism; it asserted that they were wrong or wrong headed and that they should be opposed in favor of emulation of the American example. In addition to this observation, Williams makes another provocative statement on 282 when he argues that each nation experienced a loss of identity but that the economic circumstances of each greatly influenced the kind of outlook adopted, “For the loss of identity in properity led Americans toward Freud, while the similar Russian experienced, in the context of poverty produced Dostoevski, Kuprin, and Gogol … The self knighted robber baron and the anarchist terrorist are not, after all so far apart.”
14. Williams, William Appleman, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, 268.
15. Hunt, Michael H., “The Long Crisis in U.S. Diplomatic History: Coming to Closure” in America in the World: The Historiography of American Foreign Relations Since 1941, Ed. Michael J. Hogan, Cambridge UP: Cambridge, MA, 1995, 97.

16. which in truth drives much of the discussion of the first section since many scholars disagree with its anti-exceptionalist – well I guess that’s a debatable point but still – economically driven view of American imperialism especially in its early late nineteenth/early progressive era beginnings ….. Williams uses the Open Door Policy as the thread of diplomatic policy which fueled much of American thought on expansionism and even Cold War interventions

17. Hunt, Michael H., “The Long Crisis in U.S. Diplomatic History: Coming to Closure”, 107… . “Others set off on a third line of development, also influenced by critics, by tempering but not abandoning claims that policy sprang from economic pressures … Initially, focusing on the late 1910s and the 1920s but recently extending into the post WWII period, the corporatists found a more manageable framework of inquiry in organized economic power, blocs operating in intimate relationship with the state. Banks, industries, export associations, organized labor, and farm groups reflected and articulated the needs of a complex modern capitalism. This system of private and public power was managed by elites and sustained by a corporate ideology stressing compromise in the interest of overall growth and stability.”

18. Hunt, Michael H., “The Long Crisis in U.S. Diplomatic History: Coming to Closure” 117.
19. Hunt, Michael H., “The Long Crisis in U.S. Diplomatic History: Coming to Closure” 112.
20. He also notes with some irony that historians in this group would not embrace the diplomatic banner/label.
21. In regard to transnationalism, Thomas Bender’s A Nation Among Nation: America’s Place in World History attempts to revive America’s place within global history, though not limited to the diplomatic arena. Pushing back against the kind of American exceptionalism that Gaddis’ work tacitly promotes, Bender suggests reframing American historical events to consider the influence of international and transnational forces. For this vantage point, the American Civil War appears as an extension of the 1848 revolutions which promoted a broad liberalism. Lincoln’s own language and thought found inspiration from such events. Like others, Bender encourages historians to move away from nation state structures or if they must cling to such units of analysis to do so in a broader context.

22. Kramer, Paul, The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States and the Philippines, Univ. of North Carolina Press: Chapel Hill, NC, 2006, 324. for example as the 1920s and 1930s emerged some writers employed their own version of US tropes to justify independence “Filipino nationalists responded with a nationalist-colonialist politics that saw non-Christians – and the territory they occupied – as integral to the Philippine nation but subordinate to the political agency of Christians. With regard to non-Christian peoples, Philippine nation building would also be empire building

23. Kramer seems to credit the work of Propaganda writers who wanted independence from Spain for this as they constructed an identity that though in many ways inclusive also remained guilty of the “colonial nationalism” that emerged more clearly later, “Where the ilustrado diasporic experience had led some to challenge notions of mestizaje, the Propaganda campaign also racially heightened the salience of Hispanic culture that the ilustrados - but not all of the islands’ inhabitants – shared. Where ilustrado activists held up their civilization before Spain and Europe more broadly in a quest for recognition and assimilation, Philippine peoples that could not measure up to these standards became increasingly problematic.”, 67. Kramer argues that the residue of such arguments meant that there was a “reinscription” of internal categories of difference.
24. The family metaphor proved useful as its both inclusionary and yet hierarchical.
25. Basically, that the Philippines had gone through an evolutionary process of being imperialized by increasingly “civilized” nations. The Spanish though viewed by Americans as imperfect remained better than indigenous populations but still “degenerate.” Thus, policy balanced this almost liminal state. In some ways, its related to the idea of “blood compact”, the notion that interbreeding with Europeans would somehow improve the Filipino race both physically but also culturally, though this “blood compact” is turned on its head by 1920’s American nativists who fear infection of Filipino blood.
26. Kramer, Paul, The Blood of Government, 161.
27. Kramer, Paul, The Blood of Government, 19.
28. It is worth noting that the discourse around “capability” fluctuated and even contradicted itself. For example, the establishment of a legislative assembely in 1907?? Symbolized for many Filipinos that they had illustrated the capabilities for self-rule while American policy makers viewed such as another test of such capabilities along the way. In this way, US officials used the “discourse of capability” to cloak the permanence of occupation.
29. Kaplan, Amy, The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture, Harvard UP: Cambridge, MA, 2002, 1.
30. Kaplan, Amy, The Anarchy of Empire, 1.
31. Kaplan, Amy, The Anarchy of Empire, 2.
32. Kaplan, Amy, The Anarchy of Empire, 10-11. “As “alien races,” Puerto Ricans were rendered “foreign” in the “domestic sense” by their perceived resemblance to alien races deemed to be incapable of self government at home … The category of the “unincorporated territory” held out the possibility of absorbing new members into the family while deferring this possibility to the indefinite future.”
33. meaning restore order and impose “democratic government” that one day might enable the colonized to rule themselves, “benevolent assimilation.”
34. Kaplan, Amy, The Anarchy of Empire, 11.
35. Kaplan, Amy, The Anarchy of Empire, 14.
36. Kaplan, Amy, The Anarchy of Empire, 16.
37. Kaplan, Amy, The Anarchy of Empire, 43.
38. Kaplan, Amy, The Anarchy of Empire, 50. Of additional note from chapter two are the following related quotes, “ “Domestic Discourse, I argue, both redressed and reenacted the anarchic qualities of empire through its own double movement: to expand female influence beyond the home and the nation, and simultaneously to contract woman’s sphere to that of policing domestic boundaries against the threat of foreignness.” (28). And “”Manifest Domesticity” turns an imperial nation into a home by producing and colonizing specters of the foreign that lurk inside and outside its ever shifting borders.” (50)

39. Kaplan, Amy, The Anarchy of Empire, 91.
40. Kaplan, Amy, The Anarchy of Empire, 52.
41. Kaplan, Amy, The Anarchy of Empire, 56.
42. Kaplan, Amy, The Anarchy of Empire, 63.
43. Kaplan, Amy, The Anarchy of Empire, 66.
44. Kaplan, Amy, The Anarchy of Empire, 88.
45. Kaplan, Amy, The Anarchy of Empire, 160.
46. Kaplan, Amy, The Anarchy of Empire, 138. … that is not to say he didn’t connect oppressions though he wouldn’t have described them as such, “The links between disenfranchisement in occupied Cuba and the Jim Crow South point imperialism as the exporter of the domestic color line and re-contextualize racism at home as part of a global imperial strategy of rule.” 138.
47. Briggs, Laura. Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex, Science, and U.S. Imperialism, (University of California Press: Los Angeles), 2002, 22.
48. Briggs, Laura. Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex, Science, and U.S. Imperialism, 46.
49. Briggs, Laura. Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex, Science, and U.S. Imperialism, 70 … “Between 1917 and 1918, then, gender and women’s bodies became a significant idiom in which colonial relations were negotiated. North American politicians, reformers, and missionaries identified the victimization of women, or, conversely, the danger they posed, as an important reason for massive repression and intervention. The increasingly visible poor women of the dislocated rural classes appear in this literature as “loose” women in need of containment.”
50. Briggs, Laura. Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex, Science, and U.S. Imperialism, 51. Granted I’ve jumped around here but a useful quote about how people thought about these issues in Puerto Rico is as follows, “Coloninzing men became chivalrous figures, defending virtuous women on the island from syphilis through prostitute contact with soldier husbands or protecting the mainland from infection by dirty omen; in so doing, the violence of their role was erased, transformed into heroism. Women reformers from the main land WCTU – in concert with elite Creole women from the island – enacted a maternalist, protective role, “saving” young women prostitutes from disease and immorality. Creole men, too , enacted roles as protectors, as benevolent patrones. Those who disappeared as agents were those around whom the debate swirled: working class women who sometimes sold sex in order to survive, the female counterparts of the (male) disorderly classes.” 67.
51. Briggs, Laura. Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex, Science, and U.S. Imperialism, 192.
52. Briggs, Laura. Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex, Science, and U.S. Imperialism, 117.
53. Briggs, Laura. Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex, Science, and U.S. Imperialism, 141.
54. Briggs, Laura. Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex, Science, and U.S. Imperialism, 140-1.
55. Briggs, Laura. Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex, Science, and U.S. Imperialism, 159.
56. Briggs, Laura. Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex, Science, and U.S. Imperialism, 160.
57. Briggs, Laura. Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex, Science, and U.S. Imperialism, 161.
58. Sneider, Allison, Suffragists in an Imperial Age: U.S. Expansionism and the Woman Question 1870-1929, New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2008, 112.
59. Sneider, Allison, Suffragists in an Imperial Age, 91.
60. Sneider, Allison, Suffragists in an Imperial Age, 65.
61. Sneider, Allison, Suffragists in an Imperial Age, 74.
62. Sneider, Allison, Suffragists in an Imperial Age 75.
63. Sneider, Allison, Suffragists in an Imperial Age, 86.
64. Sneider, Allison, Suffragists in an Imperial Age 134.
65. Stoler, Ann, “Intimidations of Empire: Predicaments of the Tactile and Unseen” in Haunted By Empire Ed. Ann Stoler, Duke UP: Durham, NC, 2006, 4
66. Stoler, Ann, “Intimidations of Empire: Predicaments of the Tactile and Unseen” in Haunted By Empire Ed. Ann Stoler, Duke UP: Durham, NC, 2006, 7.
67. Stoler, Ann, “Tense and Tender Ties: The Politics of Comparison in North American and (Post) Colonial Studies” in Haunted By Empire Ed. Ann Stoler, Duke UP: Durham, NC, 2006, 27.
68. Shah, Nayan, “Adjudicating Intimacies on U.S. Frontiers” in Haunted By Empire, 116.
69. Shah, Nayan, “Adjudicating Intimacies on U.S. Frontiers” in Haunted By Empire, 117.
70. Lowe, Lisa, “The Intimacies of Four Continents” in Haunted by Empire, 195 and 202.
71. Lowe, Lisa, “The Intimacies of Four Continents” in Haunted by Empire, 193.
72. Stoler Ann, ““Tense and Tender Ties: The Politics of Comparison in North American and (Post) Colonial Studies” in Haunted By Empire Ed. Ann Stoler, Duke UP: Durham, NC, 2006, 55.
73. Suri, Jeremi, The Power and the Protest: Global Revolution and the Rise of Dissent, Cambridge Mass: Harvard University Press, 2003, 13. “The creation of what one historian calls nuclear “overkill” in the late 1950s was in this sense, largely directed at an audience within the United Sates and NATO … the Eisenhower administration embarked on a series of “crash” programs – particularly in missile technology – to allay public insecurities.”
74. He expanded the arsenal, endured the Bay of Pigs Invasion, maintained the U.S.’s Vietnam policy, and negotiated the end to the Cuban Missile Crisis, though Suri seems to suggest JFK’s own policy created the situation. JFK
75. Suri, Jeremi, The Power and the Protest: Global Revolution and the Rise of Dissent, 21.
76. Suri, Jeremi, The Power and the Protest: Global Revolution and the Rise of Dissent, 216. “Responding to both domestic and international pressures in the late 1960s, leaders pursued what I call a balance of order. This involved a desperate attempt to preserve authority under siege. It emphasized stability over change, repression over reform. It was less about accepting nuclear parity than about manipulating political institutions to isolate and contain a variety of nontraditional challengers. Détente brought together an international array of threatened figures who coordinated their forces to counterbalance the sources of disorder within their societies.”
77. Suri, Jeremi, The Power and the Protest: Global Revolution and the Rise of Dissent, 244.
78. Of course, with that noted, both US and USSR officials did find “nativist” movements in the Middle East of the 1950s-60s problematic.
79. Westad, Odd Arne, The Global Cold War, Univ. of Cambridge Press: Cambridge, MA 2005, 40… . “While US and Soviet ideologies had much in common in terms of background and project, what separated them were their distinctive definitions of modernity meant. While most Americans celebrated the market, the Soviet elites denied it. Even while realizing that the market was the mechanism on which most of the expansion of Europe had been based, Lenin’s followers believed that it was in the process of being superseded by class-based collective action in favor of equality and justice. Modernity came in two stats: a capitalist form and a communal form, reflection two revolutions – that of capital and productivity, and that of democratization and the social advancement of the underprivileged. Communism was the higher stage of modernity, and it had been given to Russian workers to lead the way toward it.”
80. US is up after Guatemala and Iran – down after Bay of Pigs and Vietnam – up after Grenada and the Reaganite shift to internationalization of markets and the like whereas the USSR ignorant of 3rd world until 1955, successful in third world after American failures alienate Africans and Asians then down, way down after the Afghan War
81. Westad, Odd Arne, The Global Cold War, 157. “By around 1970 the United States had done much to create the Third World as an entity both in a positive and negative sense. Through its policies of confronting revolution, Washington had helped form blocks of resistance and a very basic form of Third World solidarity. Ironically, its interventionist policies had also contributed to radicalizing many Third World regimes, including some that were distinctly uncomfortable with any association with the Soviet Union …. The apparent success of socialist regimes – the availability of an alternative to capitalism and an alliance with America – also played a key role in radicalizing many Third World regimes, parties, and movements”
82. Westad, Odd Arne, The Global Cold War, Univ. of Cambridge Press: Cambridge, MA 2005,

Transnationalism and Urban Networks: An Introduction

2012-06-21T01:49:36Z

KevinBaker:

The expansion of transnational studies greatly enhanced history and social science’s ability to grasp the complexities and interdependence of the world’s metropolises. The transnational flows of capital, goods, ideas, and labor - representing only a handful of numerous other examples - have always existed. However their scope, speed and scale have been enhanced. Economically, transnational capital movements through “Global Cities” unhinge such cosmopolitan centers form their national and regional connections. In developing nations, emerging cities illustrate spatializations reminiscent of America’s nineteenth century metropolises. Slums in Rio, Mumbai, and Lagos represent such spatializations, where a transnational, national, or local elite occupies central areas in which housing and security abound, while its middle and lower classes struggle through varying levels of slum existence. Polarization within the workforce plagues rich and developing nations alike as transnational producer services and banking/insurance industries contribute to a developing white collar workforce, whose own consumer needs employ low level wage labor with a declining middle class serving as an increasingly thin buffer.

This economic polarization expresses itself spatially as many urban areas feature communities segregated by income and race, while also finding expression in the built environment of cities reflecting social, economic, and political processes unfolding within these municipalities. Nor is such polarization confined to the city limits. Rather, suburban and metropolitan areas illustrate a similar dynamic, as the expansion of homeownership ideologies and concurrent discourses that conflate free markets with freedom have resulted in several Western and East Asian societies privileging property-based citizenship over more civic oriented ideals.

The reorientation of history and social sciences with greater attention to transnational frameworks has been recounted numerous times, but essentially the deregulation of international and national markets throughout the 1980s and 1990s and the institutionalization of globalization through agreements like NAFTA forced many to address growing multinational connections that seemed more relevant or visible than in previous decades. Additionally, many works in the transnational field have adopted or employed theoretical frameworks that previous diplomatic historians largely ignored. The world’s expanding urbanization and increased transnational flows of peoples, goods, capital, and ideas have necessitated the conception of new urban networks socially, politically, and economically. Additionally, the application of cultural studies further broadened historical and social scientific studies. The interconnectedness of these approaches enabled scholars to push against back ideas of national exceptionalism, acknowledging that nations and peoples have developed in greater relation to each other than previously thought.

== I. Global Networks, Capital Flows and Cities ==

Though not necessarily beginning in the 1980s, but certainly central to academic inquiry and subsequently popular discourse, tropes regarding globalization emerged in relation to the world’s urban areas. Robert Cohen’s “The New International Division of Labor, Multinational Corporations and Urban Hierarchy” (1981) and John Friedmann and Goetz Wolff’s “World City Formation: Agenda for Research and Action” (1982) serve as two examples of this development. While Cohen explored the new hierarchy of urban areas based on their areas of service/industrial specialization, Friedmann and Goetz applied Cohen’s NIDL to world cities which they argued represented “a new breed of global command and control centers within the new international division of labor.” Contemporary and future urban scholars such as Saskia Sassen, Peter Marcuse, and Ronald Van Kempen among many others explored the spatial, economic, and social ramifications of these developments.

Following the impact of his 1982 collaboration with Goetz, Friedmann’s 1986 article “The World City Hypothesis” built upon earlier works by Saskia Sassen, David Harvey, and Manuel Castells. Friedman’s “world city” hypothesis gained momentum throughout the 1980s as some authors built upon or modified his conclusion’s while others viewed the world city system more skeptically as a tool used by municipalities and corporate interests to employ development policies that favored multinational and local business interests. “The World City Hypothesis” emerged as one the earlier works to connect cities to the world economy, especially in regard to the resulting spatial aspects. Moreover, Friedmann’s article never implied any hard and fast conclusions but served as a starting point for further debate.

Friedmann credits David Harvey and Manuel Castells with revolutionizing how scholars thought about urbanization. “Their special achievement was to link city forming processes to the larger historical movement of industrial capitalism … City no longer viewed as organic but rather a product of specifically social forces set in motion by capitalist relations of production. Class conflict became central to the new view of how cities evolved.” The connection between Friedmann’s work and Sassen’s appears even more stark. Not only does Friedmann reference Sassen’s work on several occasions, but Sassen’s subsequent research built upon many of his main arguments.

Seven basic assertions form the locus of Friedmann’s world city hypothesis. First, structural changes in cities will find themselves related to “the form and extent of the city’s integration with the world economy.” Within this factor, Friedmann notes the influence of “endogenous conditions” such as national policy toward immigration, policies such as South Africa’s Apartheid, and referencing Anthony King, “the spatial patterns of historical accumulation”. Here, as among others Peter Marcuse and Ronald van Kempen (Of States and Cities and Globalizing Cities) suggest, the historical background of cities impact subsequent developments. Second, certain cities function in part as tools of “global capital”, operating as “’basing points’ in the spatial organization and articulation of production and markets.” Linkages created by such conditions arrange cities into a “complex spatial hierarchy.” Third, the functions of “world cities” manifest themselves in the “structure and dynamics of their production sectors and employment”. Fundamentally, Friedmann suggests that the concentration of corporate headquarters, international finance, global transport/communications, and high level business services contribute to economic growth for both upper level workers and low wage laborers but also operate ideologically, as metropolises like New York, Los Angeles and Paris “are centers for the production and dissemination of information, news, entertainment and other cultural artifacts.” Additionally, as such areas draw increasing immigration, the informal economy expands since its formal counterpart cannot absorb them. This point relates another aspect of world cities: their role as a point of destination for migrants and immigrants.

Friedmann’s final three hypotheses focus more directly on transnational economic flows and their subsequent effects on urban populations and spatialization. First, global cities provide a location for the “concentration and accumulation of international capital.” While some nations and cities drew benefits from this development, others developed increasing amounts of international debt, which ultimately damaged their positions. Second, for all their economic growth, world cities illustrate the contradictions of industrial capitalism, the most notable being “spatial and class polarization”. The demise of unionized employment and its replacement with non-unionized personal/consumer services (domestics, boutiques, restaurants, entertainment) and low wage manufacturing (electronics, garments, prepared foods) further polarizes income and space as these burgeoning areas are juxtaposed with financial/business services. Under such pressures, middle-income earners appear to be a shrinking demographic. Finally, the costs of world city status often outweighs the “fiscal capacity of the state” which results in continuing “fiscal and social crisis” that bedevil municipal governments. The economic infrastructure desired by transnational capital and social reproduction supported by elites serve as dominant forces in state policy/actions. Thus, “the burden of capitalist accumulation is systematically shifted to the politically weakest, most disorganized sectors of the population.” Police repression in the name of both corporate and state interests further marginalize poorer residents.

Friedmann’s two articles exuded a strong influence but several other scholars also contributed vital insights. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Saskia Sassen published two works that led to widespread debate and discussion among academics. The first, The Mobility of Labor and Capital: A Study in International Investment and Labor Flow, focuses on the impact of transnational space on capital and labor. The second, The Global City, postulates that the transnational/international economies of globalization required urban nodes with dense infrastructures of telecommunications, specialization, and producer services (accounting, engineering, IT, business law and the like) to control and manage the dizzying array of financial products, instruments, and capital mobility. The two works illustrate a continuity of themes and focus, including the effects of foreign direct investment (FDI) on local economies and its role in the subsequent internationalization of production, the creation of both high level specialized producer services and low level wage employment (often in consumer services or in support of producer services and their workers), and the growth of “high tech” cities.

First, changes in FDI shifted the destination of such investments. If Latin America’s share declined, America’s rose to a great degree due to Japan’s capital infusion (Southeast Asia also experienced increases as well). With FDI comes an increased transnationalization of production. Export Processing Zones (EPZs) facilitate the movement of labor into various global regions (the U.S./Mexico border serves as one obvious example) but of equal importance are the multinational, diplomatic, and military linkages established by creation of such institutions; these linkages facilitate immigration. Here, Sassen pushes back against the traditional narrative that suggests poverty spurs such labor movements. Instead, Sassen argues that though poverty serves as one push factor, these linkages provide another. Culturally dominant, they establish labor flows to the nations from which they originate. Sassen points to examples such as South Korea where immigration to the US expanded significantly despite the nation’s own economic success. “Isolated” nations or those lacking the linkages Sassen points out illustrate lower rates of immigration. This helps to explain in part, “the contradiction between the existence of labor shortages and the existence of large unemployment worldwide … “ Additionally, Sassen notes the markedly gendered nature of these immigration/labor flows, as newer countries such as China, South Korea, Colombia, Jamaica and the Dominican Republic feature heavily female flows while “traditional immigration countries such as Italy, Portugal and Greece have mostly males.” While such divisions are relevant, Sassen notes a key aspect of this “new” immigration, “is the increase in the supply of female immigrant workers”. Providing a more quantitative sociological approach than Ananya Roy’s City Requiem, Sassen points to the very feminization of poverty and wage labor others like Roy or Nicolas De Genova have explored from more cultural anthropological perspectives. Sassen acknowledges similar developments connecting them more broadly.

Third, Sassen suggests immigration’s affect on wages may be less severe than some argue. Though she addresses this argument in greater detail in The Global City, Sassen suggests immigrants do not drive down wages or cause the casualization of labor but rather find themselves situated well to take advantage of such opportunities which arise out of structural changes. Similarly, such developments result in the increasing employment of immigrant labor in service industries.

Fourth, one easily identifies the seeds for Sassen’s later work Global City. Previewing many of her insights, Sassen notes that cities such as New York and Los Angeles feature the dual growth of labor intensive small scale industries along with an increasingly large consumer services market. Again, Sassen pushes back against many of the traditional beliefs regarding urban economies. In this context, immigration provides some relief to such sectors offering “a solution to the cheap labor question”, thus allowing struggling industries to remain competitive. Sassen’s new economy creates jobs at the producer service level but also at the low wage end of the spectrum. Middle income employment declines resulting in “the increasing polarization of the occupational and income distribution in the labor force.” However, Sassen cautions scholars to consider carefully the meaning of this expansion of low wage employment, “the available evidence for New York City shows that a majority of immigrants find employment in rather low wage jobs. The mistake lies in assuming that low wage jobs are predominantly a function of decline and backwardness.” The decentralization of office work, mechanical decentralization, and the international flow of producer and some consumerist services have contributed to the increasing importance of global nodes such as New York.

Following The Mobility of Labor and Capital, The Global City: New York, London, and Tokyo sparked debates across disciplines and fields. Sassen argues that the forces of technological/telecommunication innovation, globalization, and the decline of Fordism combined to deepen dependencies on “global cities” such as New York and Tokyo. The dispersal and decentralization that the telecommunications boom was to usher in actually contributed to a centralization process for finance in several global nodes organizing increasingly decentralized production sites. Producer services came to dominate urban economies while their employees gentrified various communities across each metropolitan area. However, with this growth came polarization.

The Global City embraces four primary themes. First, “territorial decentralization of economic activity” failed to distribute business and profits more broadly. Rather, global cities find themselves increasingly serving as powerful international financial centers. Second, Sassen places great importance on how these economies order cities internally. Here Sassen shifts to a focus on markets and the financial industry. Sassen does not discount the importance of corporations or banks but notes the striking shift toward financial investments altered various social, political, and spatial structures. Third, questions regarding the effect of global cities on the various national networks in which they situate themselves.

Others scholars such as Peter Marcuse and Ronald Van Kempen (Globalizing Cities: A New Spatial Order?) have suggested that fundamentally cities’ spatial order remains continuous in many respects. Sassen’s emphasis on economic changes argues that though this growth remains connected to a declining manufacturing base, it has altered the spatial dynamics of global cities. Though as with other scholars, Sassen designates the early 1970s as the shift away from Fordism towards a new economic reality, she also notes the importance of the 1982 debt crisis which brought numerous changes to the industry while increasing the “concentration in and orientation toward major financial centers…" According to Sassen, a key to this transformation rests on the proliferation of and investment in financial instruments which have maximized the movement of capital, increasing the activity of “investors and borrower around the world”. During the 1980s, markets seemed to have wielded a rhetorical and economic strength not previously accorded. In relation, this has meant that financial centers have become the key location for “intermediation functions” Thus, what she labels as the “organizational complexity” of internationalized finance can only be supplied by the dense “social connectivity” of urban networks, and the accumulation of firms and markets preset in urban “financial centers” like New York.

As noted, though The Global City focuses extensively on markets, financial instruments, transnational credit flow and the like, it also attempts to examine the spatial consequences of these developments, “Different types of economic growth promote different types of social forms.” If post-WWII Fordism generated a large middle class through industrial employment that encouraged consumption, which in turn fed the economic growth of the period, modern economic value lay in the creation and control over scientific knowledge, meaning that the beneficiaries of this new paradigm resemble not the expansive post war middle class of the 1950s, but the technocratic college educated professional. Women especially have benefited from new developments, ironically, gentrifying communities in each city as job opportunities previously denied or non-existent surfaced to enable their influence to be felt economically and socially. Women have replaced the suburban middle class lifestyle with a more urbane ideal. Likewise, Sassen points out, more so in New York and London than Tokyo, that immigration has produced a sort of low cost gentrification as older decaying neighborhoods have been inhabited and refurbished by England’s and America’s newcomers. Yet, for such positives Sassen also notes the negative polarization that has led to a “dual city” or what others some might call “layered”. For Sassen, gentrification is not a new process but the scale under which it unfolds is. Gentrification’s manifestations differ in each of the three cities: New York’s bears witness to the rise of an “informal market” for both labor and goods, Japan’s unmoored rural workers such that a system that once offered some protection offers less creating a mobile but impoverished workforce, and London’s government privatized numerous services once supplied by the municipality itself.

In 2000, Richard Child Hill and June Woo Kim offered a corrective to Sassen’s global city examples. In “Global Cities and Developmental Sates: New York, Tokyo, and Seoul”, Hill and Kim argue that Sassen incorrectly couched cities such as Seoul and Tokyo with New York and Los Angeles. While the latter feature free market deregulatory federal and municipal governments, Tokyo and Seoul’s governments intervene to a far greater extend in labor, economic, and housing markets. Moreover, Seoul and Tokyo governments find themselves under the influence of bureaucratic and national elites rather than the transnational variant. As well each serves as a center for “indigenous not foreign companies, and their international infrastructure is primarily rooted in state ministries and bureaus, not in private finance and producer service firms.” Other significant differences exist, but Hill and Kim emphasize the point that much of world systems theory and global city conceptualization argues for a diminished, less relevant state. Tokyo and Seoul challenge this viewpoint suggesting “the economic base, spatial organization and social structure of the world’s major cities are strongly influenced by the national development model and regional context in which each city is embedded.”

== II. Cities, States and Spatialization ==

Though Sassen, Friedmen, Hill, and Kim all address aspects of spatialization, they do so as a secondary goal in illustrating world system functions. Additionally, with the notable exception of Hill and Kim, Friedman and Sassen downplay the presence of state actors. Instead, Peter Marcuse, Ronald Van Kempen and several others have explored the recent spatial history and processes of cities along with the role of the nation state.
As mentioned, over the past several decades urbanization in the developing nations increased exponentially. Scholars have provided numerous explanations for this growth. Cities and Development in the Third World attends to one aspect of Third World urbanization and development, and as such places the nation-state at the forefront of discussion. Though certainly not theoretical in the sense of Michael Foucault or Antonio Gramsci, editors Robert B. Potter and Ademola T. Salau seek to reorient the study of cities in developing nations, encouraging historians and others to consider the importance of informal economies, reject Western imposed ideas/modes of development, place greater faith in indigenous solutions, and acknowledge the role of national and local states in Third world development.

Published in 1990, Cities and Development reflects the influence of contemporary events and shifts in the profession. Several themes that emerged prominently by the mid 1990s among many historians are in evidence here. Potter’s contribution “Cities, Convergence, Divergence and Third World Development” encourages scholars to “avoid false schisms” like the urban/rural dichotomy. Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, urban historians sought to do just this. Ananya Roy’s City Requiem, Calcutta: Gender and the Politics of Poverty serves as only one recent example, as Roy explored squatter settlements and migration’s spatial and political relations. Additionally, H.A.C. Main’s “Housing Problems and Squatting Solutions in Metropolitan Kano” provides an African example of one of Roy’s central points, that squatter settlements provide governments with political constituencies and mobilization while also supplying labor to the local economy. However, Roy’s work differs from Potter and Salau’s collection in that Cities and Development, with the possible exception of Potter’s second contribution, “Shelter in Urban Barbados, West indies: Vernacular Architecture, Land Tenure and Self Help”, focuses strictly on economic, demographic, and political developments. Cultural aspects or gender considerations receive virtually no attention.

Still, in other ways, Potter and Salau’s work reinforces other developments among transnational writers. For example, as David Harvey and Arjun Appadurai (whom at least one writer cites here) have cautioned that writers, developers, and others must resist imposing Western oriented answers.
From a broader viewpoint, Cities and Development’s authors illustrate the pervasive urban bias that development plans emphasize. The crisis of rural economies has not been the focus of most government efforts. Moreover, as Roy and several articles in Globalizing Cities note, the colonial histories of various Third World cities remain deeply influenced by their former occupiers. K. Sita and M. Chatterjee utilize this framework to examine “metropolitan dominance in India” while David Drakakis Smith points out the negative economic and health influences colonialism had on “urban food distribution systems.”

The importance of the informal economy serves as another theme. Potter observes that the sheer size and growth of the informal market as an alternative to over extended states requires historians to reevaluate the role of such markets in the developing world. Potter’s quote points to the very economic developments that Roy emphasizes have contributed to the “feminization of livelihood.”

Finally, transnational historians might take Potter and Salua to task. Though the work covers a wide geographic range, much of it remains nation state bound. Some of the articles maintain an interiority in their analysis. Multinationals, and international economic organizations such as the IMF receive scant attention. Additionally, as already noted, cultural aspects or gender considerations remain absent.

Globalizing Cities: A New Spatial Order? explores how several broad categories (race/racism, globalization, migration, new demographics, changing role of public sector, changing and patterns of choice) have affected the formation of six basic “spatial divisions”: citadels, gentrified neighborhoods, suburbs, working class areas, ethnic enclaves, and exclusionary ghettos. Contributors studied cities from around the world including Singapore, Tokyo, Calcutta, New York, Brussels, Frankfurt, and Rio Di Janeiro. As a sum of its parts, the work embraces a transnational comparative approach.

Marcuse and Van Kempen put forth a general hypothesis regarding the development of urban metropolises since the 1970s. Acknowledging that cities have always illustrated divisions along cultural, functional and economic lines, the current pattern “is a new and in many ways deeper going combination of these divisions”. No uniform model exists such that each city manifests these changes differently but in general the new spatial order’s basic features “included a spatial concentration within cities of a new urban poverty on the one hand, and of specialized 'high level' internationally connected business activities on the other, with increasing spatial divisions not only between each of them, but also among segments of the 'middle class' in between.” Social and physical boundaries providing the separation have proliferated and hardened. Though many of these developments are market driven the state plays a significant and key role. If it can create these conditions, it can also erase them.

The contributors provide numerous key insights into global urban development. First, significant differences exist between Third World urban development and that of the U.S. and Western Europe. Racial spatialization in the form of “ghettoes of exclusion” have been thought to be a U.S. phenomena but Western Europe’s infusion of immigrants, retreat of state welfare, and structural economic changes point to a similar future. In contrast, Third World cities exhibit a very different spatialization. For example, Sanjoy Chakravorty’s essay on Calcutta revealed that though ghettoes exist, they “are not large … and this spatial pattern is not confined to the poor …” Moreover, the historical contingency of post-colonialism re-oriented the organization of the city unlike its Western counterparts. Divisions rest more on class than race.

Second, the conceptualization of the city as an organic whole entity fails to impress the editors. Rather they argue the cities remain layered entities that remain spatially and temporally divided. Residents of different classes, races, and ethnicities may use the same spaces but not at the same time and not for the same purposes. Marcuse and van Kempen use the layered city metaphor noting that each space has residential layer, a work layer, a transportation layer and so on. This reality requires greater attention to the conceptualization of urban environments.

Marcuse and van Kempen encourage the state to become more intimately involved. The example of Singapore illustrates that state intervention can alter isolating spatializations (and seems to support Hill and Kim’s conclusions regarding the importance of the state in spatial and economic structures). Of course, the editors caution the development of negative ghettoization, in which the state forces residents “to live where they do not wish [in some cases] away from those with whom they would like to be near.” The weaknesses of Globalizing Cities' approach lay in the fact that 1) spatialization occurs as result of many factors that are not spatial and 2) the numerous contingencies between examples in a comparative approach complicates generalizations.

Building on their 2000 work, Marcuse and van Kempen challenged transnational discourses that devalued government power. In contrast to narratives that diminish the nation-state, Marcuse and van Kempen reassert the role of the state in urban spatial developments. Moreover, Of States and Cities stresses the multiplicity of interests and government powers to illustrate that a monolithic view of government proves myopic. Here they return to expand on their previous conceptions of city’s partitions, “attempting to define in orderly fashion such terms as ‘ghetto’, ‘enclave’, ‘citadel’ …” For Marcuse, van Kempen, and many of the work’s other contributors “the state has been a dominant force in creating and enforcing partitions” but economic forces have provided a parallel influence.

Throughout history, cities have displayed levels of partitioning, but the forces behind such divisions do not remain static. If class, ethnicity or race, serve as foundations for urban partitions in the modern city, its historical antecedents often divided early burgeoning metropolises along culture, status, and function. However, the conflict between function and status haunts cities for centuries. Marcuse points out that functional and cultural differences “are in general voluntary, divisions by status are not.” Thus, “state partitioning” of communities especially along cultural, class, or racial lines threatens democratic developments. Of note, Marcuse acknowledges that while “racial segregation was an accompaniment of citadel formation” the two were not identical as status in colonial cities grew out of both economic and political significance. Moreover, spatially these ghettoes lacked the exclusionary aspect of Fordist and Post-Fordist cities, “ghettos in colonial cities were economically integrated with the societies in which they existed.” The rise of capitalism altered spatialization patterns as markets became the main arbiter. The role of the state in spatialization changed with these developments. Government and quasi government powers effectively reinforced these spatialized divisions. Post Fordist cities increasingly removed manufacturing and industry from the city center, moving them to the periphery. The growth of edge cities, suburbs and the like grew in relation. Additionally, one can also designate similar growth in citadels and exclusionary ghettoes. Finally, socialist cities emerged with a spatialization that in theory avoided segregation by class and race but in practice failed to achieve such ends. In fact, the decline of the Fordist economies along with the demise of the USSR resulted in post-communist cities undergoing even more intense polarization.

Of States and Cities includes essays (besides those mentioned above) on Sao Paulo, Istanbul, Britain, Holland, and the role of place in social and advance marginality. Though each offers unique perspectives on their various topics, a few generalizations might be made. For example, the retreat of many governments from the welfare state has meant that in nations such as Holland where class and ethnic diversity in various communities was not uncommon, more market based approaches have shifted municipal funding from social housing (rentals) to ownership, resulting in greater class/ethnic polarization. Each has displaced segments of the population. Likewise, formerly communist cities like Budapest and those in Poland display similar stratifications as former anti-communists benefited from the collapse of communism but new spatial patterns have reduced egalitarianism, creating metropolises that while imperfect under socialism, emerge as increasingly polarized by class and ethnicity today.

Not all cities are global, and many remain subject to state pressures. The spatialized effects of 1950s and 60s central planning in England and the Non-Plan movement that responded to it serve as the focus of Non-Plan: Essays on Freedom, Participation and Change in Modern Architecture. In his contribution to this collection of essays, Chinedu Umenyilora explores the promise and feasibility of “self-build” – the policy allowing people in developing countries to construct their own homes — closing with a remark that encapsulates much of Non-Plan’s approach: “There is uncertainty as to whether one can effectively design good communities, but we can assist and enable communities to design themselves.” Umenyilora underscores much of the Non-Plan movement’s intentions while acknowledging its faults.

Emerging in the mid-late 1960s through the journal New Society (“a weekly magazine of social inquiry” established in 1962), writers such as Peter Hall, Paul Barker, Reyner Banham, Cedric Price among others put forth an iconic issue known as Non-Plan. Provoking outrage and indignation among urban planners and architects, Non-Plan dismissed centralized urban planning as beset with damaging consequences. What the field claimed to be innovations were really repacked plans from earlier decades and centuries, “The point is to realize how little planning and the accompanying architecture have changed. The whole ethos is doctrinaire; and if something good emerges it is a bit of a bonus.” Instead, the writers advocated a free wheeling development dictated by local communities rejecting the values or intentions of planners: “physical planners have no right to set their value judgment up against yours, or indeed anyone else’s. If the Non Plan experiment works really well, people should be allowed to build what they like. Agency for communities and individuals from the state emerged as one the movement’s central tenets, establishing what Peter Hall called participatory architecture. Non-Plan allowed for freedom but offset such liberties with a cost, paid for by those benefiting from such developments. Reacting to centralized urban planning, Non-Plan practitioners demanded greater community involvement encouraging the architectural profession to change its ways, becoming as much facilitators as designers. Social engineering through architecture and planning emerged as anathema to Non-Planners who refuted such efforts arguing “architectural schemes associated with Modernism, and which were designed to resolve social problems exacerbated them.”

Of course, as several contributors to this collection of essays notes, Non-Plan, though perceived as a fundamentally centre-left enterprise at the time, has been appropriated by conservative forces pressing market-based deregulated development and the like. Though critical of the urban planning and architectural professions, Non-Plan failed to consider the strength of capitalist economies to dictate development and building standards. Ben Franks addresses this subject in his essay “New Right/New Left,” arguing that the late development of a formal New Right movement allowed many future conservatives to remain tied to a broad New Left that was beginning to fragment. The rise of squatting illustrated the more conservative elements of the Non-Plan approach: “Social divisions and hierarchies were rejected by the squatters but not by the planners (who wanted to save their professional role) or the Non-Planners (who wanted to keep the division between those who build and the consumer who will use the building). The division of labour and primacy of the individual as consumer was also maintained by Hayek.” Other contributors such as Clara Greed suggest, even Non-Plan reified binaries such as man/women and plan and non-plan, clouding alternative approaches with false frameworks or ways of thinking about planning. Simon Sandler acknowledges the nominal impact Non-Plan has had on construction practices but does note its influence on more avant-garde planning and architectural approaches. Ultimately, Sadler applauds Non-Planner efforts to undermine fixity and monumentalism, but he laments its inability to transcend the academic: “the relationship between architecture and event became in turn reified. Non-planning’s ambition to create ‘event spaces’ and new types of living was sincere, but its legacy was very largely one of tremendous images, representations and simulations of architecture as a process.” In fact, Sadler labels Non-plan an extreme expression of “modernism’s ‘openness’” as it placed overwhelming faith in “a slightly fantastical imagining of contemporary society as one of the exponential economic growth, liberalization, and technical innovation … “ while attempting “to make architecture seem relevant by subjecting it to the vicissitudes of the moment rather than the solid ground of Gestalt …. “

Johnathan Hughes comes to similar conclusions in his evaluation of architectural practices and concerns following Non-Plan’s emergence. Though acknowledging increased attention by architects to alternative solutions and to promoting agency for the public, the responses to Non-Plan were often “contradictory and occasionally ineffectual …” Critical of the urbanism built on automobility promoted by Banham (Los Angeles: The Architecture of the Four Ecologies) and the authors of Learning from Las Vegas: The Forgotten Symbolism of the Architectural Form , Hughes argues “it was urbanism for those with mobility and the resources to consume.” Hughes points out that Non-Plan’s “leave cities alone” approach found allies in the Thatcher government who put “laissez faire ‘enterprise zones’” into practice. Of which Hughes documents the London Docklands Development Corporation (LDDC) which from 1980 on resulted in testimony to the failures of free market non-planning efficiency as the area resembles an ugly melding of architectural styles built on short term self interest. Moreover, in an American context this idea of “hands off urban areas” meshed well with shrinking federal aid to American metropolitan regions.

Non- Plan: Essays on Freedom Participation and Change in Modern Architecture and Urbanism re-evaluates the controversial Non-Plan movement of the 1960s. Though the movement’s intentions lay in promoting agency, freedom, and a participatory architecture in the face of an overbearing state backed urban planning system, its libertarian impulses found themselves appropriated by conservative forces. Its impact on more experimental forms, representations, and simulations remained more prominent than its tangible results in construction, though it at least helped to encourage developers and planners to consider alternative approaches and to listen more attentively, even if not devolving much power to the public. Non-Plans critics suggest, its largest failures as movement reside in its naïve optimism regarding economic expansion, faith in technocratic leadership, and unconscious acceptance of capitalist market based norms. As the opening quote suggests, Non-Plan placed faith in the individual and the community to plan their own development but its own libertarian approach encouraged capital flow dominance and conservative appropriation, which may or may not have served the very interest Non-Plan hoped to promote.

== III. Migration and Urban Networks ==

Though transnational capital and global systems theory help understand complex economic factors, they often fail to explore the specificity of spatialization and its political, economic, and social consequences. Granted, the aforementioned works by Marcuse and van Kempen investigate developing urban spatializations, but they stop short of a cultural analysis. Few of the previously discussed scholars, examine the effects of race, class, gender, and their intersections at the ground level. Instead, other disciplines have served to fill this breach most notably in this section, anthropologists Ananya Roy and Nicolas De Genova and urban planner/architect Ney dos Santos Oliveira.

Ney dos Santos Oliveira, a professor of Architecture and Planning utilized a transnational comparative framework in 1996 article ““Race and Class in Rio de Janeiro and New York City” in order to examine the relationship between race and class in the establishment and proliferation of Brazilian favelas and American ghettos. “Political empowerment” of residents serves as a special point of focus for Oliveira. Like Ananya Roy’s recent work on squatters and commuter women, Oliveira hopes to excavate the potential and reality of political mobilization for both spatial communities (favelas and ghettos). Perhaps surprisingly, Oliveira concludes that despite diminished funding (in comparison with their American counterparts), Rio’s favelas organize more effectively, remain independent from state co-option which enables broader progressive movements. Moreover, favelas focus on class identity facilitates broader alliances but also allow for the maintenance of a racial identity for participants.

Brazil’s history of urban spatialization differs sharply from the United States. Slavery, more widespread throughout the country rather than confined to a region as in the US, meant that racial spatial patterns following Brazil’s gradual emancipation lacked the polarized racial demographics of the U.S. Additionally, favelas have long illustrated a more diverse racial and class integration than American ghettos. From the 1930s through the 1970s, both the U.S. and Brazil engaged in urban development plans that resulted in similar failures as far less affordable housing was constructed than expected. With new external factors such as globalization, Oliveira wants to know ““if social mobilization is strongly and decisively dependent on spatial concentration.” In moments, Oliveira echoes ideas put forth by Saskia Sassen in The Mobility of Capital and Labor. Oliveira suggests that the concentration of class based identities in favelas provides them a special political power, much like the proportionally small but dense immigrant communities of Sassen’s work that enable such populations to wield political power despite their smaller numbers . Moreover, globalization contributes to an economic polarization that further divides Rio and New York. This new relationship between capital and labor require scholars to reevaluate the “categories of race and class”. If many American communities such as those featuring former public housing in Chicago have begun the long process of gentrification, so too have favelas endured this process as middle class Brazilians move into many, pushed further out by rising land prices.

Though Oliveira concludes that community favela movements’ effectiveness exceeds similar efforts by their American counterparts , both too often organize around service delivery for political mobilization. Ultimately, both movements need more “comprehensive political agendas” exceeding race and class while defining their goals “on the basis of critical emancipatory particiapation.”

The movement of peoples often leads to discourses that totalize or reduce identities. For example, when discussing “Hispanics” or Latinos, such designations lump together numerous and diverse nationalities that frequently differ politically and socially. Chicago’s Mexican and Puerto Rican communities provide a useful window into these differences in Nicolas De Genova and Ana Y. Ramos-Zayas’ Latino Crossings: Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and the Politics of Race and Citizenship. Utilizing a collaborative enthnography based on a comparative analytic in which the two anthropologists pooled their field work on the respective Chicago Mexican and Puerto Rican communities, Latino Crossings explores the complex process of identity formation and the difficulties in maintaining Pan-Latino identities. Spatial concerns, most notably each community’s need to stake out there own “neighborhood” in Chicago, provide a source of inquiry. Focusing on the Humbolt Park (Puerto Rican) and Pilsen (Mexican, Mexican American), De Genova and Ramos-Zayas conduct exhaustive ethnographic studies analyzing interviews for discourse and opinions on gender, inter-ethnic relations (most prominently Puerto Rican - Mexican), and race.

Latino Crossings employs a citizenship lens to examine how such issues affect inter-ethnic perceptions and representations. For example, the citizenship status of Puerto Ricans enables some to claim welfare benefits and other state services which numerous Mexicans cannot access because of their lack of citizenship status. However, some in the Mexican community use this example of access to criticize Puerto Ricans as cultureless, lazy, and unproductive. Conversely, some Puerto Ricans accuse Mexicans of sacrificing their self-respect for low paying wage labor in degrading work conditions. Language often thought of as a unifying principle here illustrates how it might also be used to divide. Spanish and English language prowess or lack thereof, among Mexicans and Puerto Ricans is used by each community to critique the social status of the other, pointing to the interethnic tensions at play. The work also explores the complex perceptions of and prejudices toward African Americans that some Puerto Ricans and Mexicans share.

When De Genova and Ramos-Zayos place both communities in a national perspective, they argue that neither translates well to a broader white culture, mitigating attempts at coalitions and alliances. If citizenship gives access to Puerto Ricans toward a declining welfare state that no longer provides an adequate safety net then non-citizenship denies Mexicans legal identities subjecting them to informal labor markets. Both authors followed this work with books on their respective community.

De Genova’s Working the Boundaries built on many aspects of his collaboration with Ramos-Zayos but expanded his research to the transnational level (Latino Crossings exhibited transnational awareness but focused more on each group’s experiences in Chicago) connecting rural Mexico to Chicago to American national immigration policy. Like many other transnational scholars, De Genova wants to disrupt the idea of the nation-state arguing that the border remains a fictive construct. Applying an interdisciplinary approach that employs the work of Henri Lefebvre, Paulo Freire, Marxsm, whiteness studies, post-colonial research, and feminist scholars, De Genova tackles several large issues. As with Latino Crossings, De Genova’s field work consisted of interviews and interactions with students he encountered as an ESL teacher for several Chicago area factories. Working the Boundaries clearly displays De Genova’s central role in the narrative. The class content of his ESL course often developed out the interplay between himself, his student’s interest, and management’s own agenda. In this way, De Genova offers a critique of such programs and their ultimate intentions.
Class relations also serve as a point of focus for De Genova. Racial-class perceptions between Puerto Ricans, Mexicans, Blacks, and poor whites also come into focus. He uses interactions with workers through the language classes to examine such issues but also uncovers ideas of relational identity as many articulate raciality that claims neither blackness or whiteness, while at the same time sometimes maintains a privileged sense of whiteness based on a pronounced anti-black racism.

Critically, De Genova also discusses the construction of “illegality” to criminalize Mexican and Mexican American populations. Though not directly related, De Genova seems to echo David Guitierrez’s landmark work Walls and Mirrors. De Genova notes that this legal production of illegality end up affecting undocumented and documented Mexican nationals and Mexican Americans. Market forces and industrial employers then harness this illegality to manipulate labor pools.

If De Genova explores the use of space and illegality to control labor flows in Mexican Chicago, others have taken his transnational approach and applied it elsewhere. Over the past 30 years, numerous forces have conspired to drive millions of people to cities across the developing world. The increased migration of peoples to Third World cities has resulted in the creation of slums, shanty towns, and squatter settlements. However, debate over the reasons for and the meaning of such developments emerged in the 1960s and 70s but seem particularly relevant today. With this in mind, Ananya Roy’s City Requiem Calcutta : Gender and the Politics of Poverty explores the gendered subjectivities of “distress migration” on female migrant workers through ethnography, public records, and anthropological observation. Roy employs a gender analytic along with a highly theoretical approach that utilizes Antonio Gramsci, Micheal Foucault, and Jiurgen Habermas through Fraser’s “counterpublics”. City Requiem ‘s gendered analytic documents numerous themes regarding the landless migrants of Calcutta’s outskirts including the “feminization of work”, the negotiability of “informality”, and the “double gendering” of settlement life, As opportunities in the countryside remain desperate, increasing numbers of the poor migrate to the cities. With this new “distress migration” comes the proliferation of slums and squatter settlements. Despite the marginality ascribed to both forms of shelter, slum dwellers hold a slightly more secure position in a stratified South Asian society. Roy notes the negotiability of the unmapped Calcutta landscape. This allows both the state and political parities to operate through a “negotiability”, that ensures the existence of squatter settlements to serve state/party interests. The state benefits from the accessible labor while the party utilizes the squatter presence for “political mobilization.” The shifting around of squatters to various areas around Calcutta illustrates this power dynamic. Roy attempts to melt the urban rural divide noting that in her field work she discovered the interconnectedness of squatter settlements and the wider region, “each of my fieldwork sites was a node, an intersection of practices and exchanges that stretched across multiple institutional and physical spaces.” Access to land depended the negotiations of domestic lives. Political sponsorships and local politics generally reflected a masculinized discourse, harnessed often by unemployed men to justify their activities. In contrast, women found themselves subject to work from domestic service to foraging for firewood. Of course, this excludes what many characterize as their “second shift” which involves caring for children, maintaining some sense of family structure. Roy finds that the female networks of support often withered in the face of economic political realities of squatter settlements, though masculinized political systems fared only marginally better. Referring to this as “double gendering” , notes “that [it] inextricably links the feminization of livliehood to the masculinization of politics.” Ultimately, such formations maintain a “persistent poverty” that “must be understood as the knotting of family and regime, a congealing of gender and class hierarchies.”

If gender reveals power dynamics and the hegemonic structures individuals negotiatate daily, Roy’s interaction with the commuter women accomplishes this task well. As mentioned, the “feminization of livliehood” emerges as a significant theme. Moreover, the bodies of women become stand in for nation.
As Laura Briggs in Reproducing Empire or Amy Kaplan in The Anarchy of Empire illustrate the discourse of motherhood creates space for women politically and socially, however, Roy also cautions that it might actually domesticate issues of “community involvement and development.”
The presence of commuter women on Bengal’s trains serves as a disruption of the gender and class hierarchies. Roy pushes further arguing that “the commuter women come to occupy the bourgeois spaces of normalized public, and they do so with a sense of entitlement and belonging.. ” Much like late nineteenth and early twentieth century American “factory girls”, commuter women endure repeated questioning of their sexual character and practices. Roy situates such women as parallels to the figures of African American women in earlier decades. Thus, their work and presence serves as a political act, though masculine discourses frequently attempt to dispute such inferences. In this way, “by emphasizing how the depoliticization of women’s work occurs on a daily basis through the dynamics of masculinest patronage” Roy argues domestications are “negotiated through lived practices” not policies or government agendas. Additionally, Roy reveals ways in which despite their unequal circumstances, that squatters and migrants see their limited participation in “urban informality” as their place in an urban electorate whereas their previous existence in rural areas displayed a perceived lack of such agency. Finally, City Requiem illustrates spatial themes that Globalizing Cities, Cities and Third World Development, and Of States and Cities illustrate, most notably the idea of historical contingency especially for former colonial metropolises. Her use of space and squatter legal legitimacy along with her anthropological field approach appear reminiscent of Working the Boundaries and Latino Crossings. However though both of these latter works engage gender, they fail to focus on it as extensively as City Requiem.

As with the above examples, many social scientists and historians find globalization to be a complicated process that fails to deliver on many of its promises. Like De Genova, Adam McKewon exhibits a skepticism toward nation-states and their borders. McKeown’s Melancholy Order: Asian Migration and the Globalization of Borders pushes back against recent work on globalization. For McKeown, recent work on this trend neglects the historical dynamic of border creation. The lack of nuance in such debates irks McKeown who notes that globalization follows neither a linear path of progression nor a more negative decline into chaos rather it creates new identities and urban networks sometimes in opposition to what may seem to a “homogenizing universalism.” Along the way, McKeown invokes theoretical approaches by Foucault and Jurgen Habermas while paying close attention to the transnational nature of migration policy. American migration policy develops in relation to international events/perceptions and interaction with nation states such as China and Japan. Like Paul Kramer and others, McKeown also notes that the counter flow of imperialized subjects to American shores (Filipinoes, Chinese and so forth) which upset American racial hierarchies contributing to the future independence of the Philippines as anti-imperialists and local labor antagonisms conspired to eliminate future Asian migration by endorsing independence.

Melancholy Order illustrates the influence of new cultural approaches to history. Though it examines juridical examples, government policy, and interaction between government and societal elites, McKeown also explores the discourse around migration and those engaging in such movement. Before 1870, governments explored various migration policies. According to McKeown, a key shift in migration policy occurred in the 1870s when the language of commerce began to overpower the previous language of intercourse. This occurred concurrently with the rise of the nation-state which became both the arbiter and giver of rights. Asian governments established institutions to “enforce free migration” from abuses by “despotic regimes” or “brokers”. In contrast, American policy makers declared all private “organization of migration” illegitimate unless it adhered to government surveillance, thus establishing a pattern of demonization regarding local migration actors and organizations that continues today. Migration never occurred freely. Regulation unfolded either from government officials and workers or previous to a secure nation state, local actors and organizations. This is not to say one was inherently more equitable than the other, however it does illustrate the reality of migration itself as a heavily mediated process.

Asian migrants found themselves caught in a discourse of slavery, corruption, and immorality. Chinese laborers, sometimes referred to as “coolies”, endured conflations with forced labor while many Chinese women were assumed to be licentious and disease ridden. Similarly, Chinese men (followed by Japanese and Filipinoes) were portrayed as opium smoking corrupting womanizers who might sell white women into sexual slavery. If this lacked cultural force, the combination of egalitarian tropes of self government and the distrust of “big capital” further undermined the social and economic position of Asian laborers.

The rise of the nation-state, racism, and economic interest, all influenced conceptions of global movement. However, extraterrioriality and the idea of “civilized states” also contributed significantly to migration policy. “Civilized nations” were accorded greater respect and rights internationally, the presence of extraterritorial rights in one’s other nations served as an indicator of a country’s civilizing deficiencies. Additionally, American mobs attacking Chinese subjects in the U.S. weakened Chinese views of their own government’s efficacy. The failure of China’s government to protect its subjects in some ways undermined its authority, thus officials engaged in self-restriction in an effort to address this issue despite its lack of political strength.

The rise of passports attempted to monitor migration but when its proliferation from numerous sources caused doubts, visas arose. Still, for many observers devices as visas and passports failed to regulate migration flows adequately. Therefore, several Anglo nations incorporated the “race neutral” “Natal Formula” to stem immigration. Even Japan and India adopt their own passport controls over “potential emigrants” signaling “the logic of discrete cultural nations and border control had superseded empire as the most relevant political form for a world of mass mobility.” Moreover by mid century, national economic interest served as both “a globally accepted justification of all forms of migration control, but a foundation for the very understanding of migration and regulation.” Yet, this economic focus obscured the fact that “race and the ideal of self government had worked together to make the national community more attractive than empire as a form of political membership in a modern world of free migration.”

Ultimately, McKeown’s work hopes to prevent a forgetting of past policies, which might very well lead to solutions or migration policy that repeat mistakes of the past while ignoring the nuanced reality of the issue. Anti-Asian migratory controls across empires reveals the seeds of today’s debates. The tools of identification and border control emerged not recently but in the late nineteenth century, continuing to service today in debates over issues of self determination and rights Such language and frameworks developed not recently but last century, having only hardened over tine.

== IV. Housing Forms, Homes, and Homeownership ==

By the early 1980s, writers had also begun to address the meaning of various housing types and the discourses or identities associated with them.
Undoubtedly the free market rhetoric of the 1980s encouraged several scholars to adopt skeptical views of home ownership, seeing in such formations the co-option of residents by free market capitalism. For writers like Anthony King, David Harvey and to a lesser extent Richard Ronald, the home became the site of capital accumulation entwining its inhabitants into a consumerist wage earning existence and recasting cultural-social relations.

Anthony King published The Bungalow: The Production of Global Culture in 1984. King combined an interdisciplinary approach with a transnational perspective, tracing the growth of the “bungalow” from its indigenous existence in India to the colonial appropriations by British imperialists in India and Africa to its North American counterparts, ending with Australia’s adoption. Moreover, like many other historians of the period, King discusses the bungalow in the context of cultural production, economics, politics (notably urban planning), and imperialism.

Beginning with the bungalow’s emergence among India’s people, King illustrates how British imperialists adopted many of its aspects while altering it in various ways. Imperialists utilized the bungalow to house its civil servants and officials ruling India. The spatialization of such housing (externally and internally) effectively helped socially segregate both the British from its Indian subjects but also later for class divisions between Indians themselves. With the onset of the 20th century, Indian elites employed by the British empire as government officials and the expansion of the colonial economy contributed to the growth of an Indian middle class that came to occupy similar housing. Patterns of racial spatialization easily slid into social segregation by class. A key factor in the spread of the bungalow rests on this economic expansion. Bungalows served as a key form of capital accumulation in this context. The bungalow also recast family relations. Extended families in colonial Africa found themselves unable to occupy such housing, forcing the nuclear family formation on peoples who practiced a different set of familial relations.

Yet, the bungalow remained a primarily Indo-British product. Its initial appearance in England revolved around in part changes in the rural economy and the value of rural land due to industrialization and transportation innovations, as well as the result of expanding London businesses and capital mobility. Located predominantly in seaside locations, the bungalow was imbued with health and sanitary ideals stressing the value of nature, sea air, and open green space. Additionally, upper middle class values found expression in the housing form. The prefabrication of the bungalow in early 20th century England resulted in a reorganization of land use and value. As these processes progressed, the cultural forms taking shape around the bungalow emphasized simplicity and a bohemian lifestyle. Government subsidies led to a proliferation in their development. Interestingly, just as the bungalow came to be a possible dwelling for working class English, bourgeoisie critics began to disparage its architectural traits while urban planners made their construction less feasible, ostensibly limiting the lower classes from sharing space with the middle and upper classes.

In North America, the bungalow appealed to reformers (who emphasized space, nature, and gendered spatialization of the interior), feminists (who stressed simplicity and efficiency) and anti-communist tropes that privileged its individualistic aspects over more communal architecture such as apartments. However, post WWII prosperity left the bungalow in dire straits as it was seen as too austere and limiting. The California bungalow drew increased attentions as its cultural form spread far and wide.

As British colonial expansion continued, Africans witnessed the re-importation of the form, which King argues further altered familial structures, social segregation (during and after colonialism), and cultural values. For imperialists it supplied shelter and protection from malaria and other diseases. The imposition of nuclear family structures disrupted more typical extended family arrangements common to Africa. (To be fair, King focuses heavily on Western Africa.) Perhaps, of equal importance, imperialism’s decline did not remove the spatial markers associated with the bungalow. African elites embraced social segregation while firmly placing themselves in the wage-earning sphere of western capitalist expansion. If land had been under a form of collective ownership, the bungalow and the spatial patterns that came with it led to a more individualistic/commercial form. Moreover, western materials and techniques pervaded African housing.

Coming to Australia last, King notes that the world’s smallest continent serves as a control subject, since it lacked a previously built environment and featured a relatively homogenous population. Australia’s lack of development meant it grew wholly from Britain’s economic surplus, or what King calls ‘dependent urbanization’. Moreover, the lack of previous development meant that none were ever industrial nor did they inherit “old preindustrial housing or newer rented ‘industrial’ housing built to accommodate labor close to factories.” Ironically, California’s example rather than Britain’s provided the basic inspiration for Australia’s bungalow proliferation. The bungalow combined with zoning to protect and maintain property values. Australians turned to the bungalow because its artistic individualism and rustic appearance appealed to the capitalist development taking hold.

Ultimately, the bungalow emerged as a form of capitalist accumulation and consumption: new needs from the romantic ideal of newlyweds sharing their first home to the materials required for construction to the consumer products employed within. The bungalow became embedded within a broader ideology that ties individualism to homeownership.

In contrast, Marxist thinker David Harvey focuses less on form and more on space. Harvey wants to limit the privileged position scholars have designated time and history over space and geography. For Harvey, the emphasis on time and history, though valuable, ignores equally important developments: “Historical materialism appeared to license the study of historical transformations while ignoring how capitalism produces its own geography.” Too many works failed to truly conceptualize how “space is produced and how the process of production of space integrate into the capitalist dynamic and its contradictions… ” Harvey’s contribution in Consciousness and the Urban Experience utilizes theory, cultural productions and the “experiences” of Parisians from 1850-1870 to provide a catalog of capitalistic urbanization’s affects and as he noted, contradictions .

As a leading Marxist, Harvey’s ideas regarding monetization and the pervasive influence of capital mobility should come as little surprise. According to Harvey, the community of money imposes individualism along with “certain conceptions of liberty, freedom, and equality backed by laws of private property, rights to appropriation, and freedom of contract.” For Harvey, money “concentrates social power in space” with little restraint which in turn commodifies space such that it brings “all space under the single measuring rod of money value.” The real danger here for Harvey lay in commodification’s ability to undermine class relations where people identify themselves along differentiated lines of status that rarely illustrate inclusiveness. Despite its obvious Marxist leanings, Harvey’s point resonates as such processes unfolded in nineteenth century France and post WWII America . This community of money fragments society while also subsuming other forms of solidarities. Circulation of capital or capital mobility as some writers might characterize it, functions to destabilize identities and memberships even fragmenting protest against it. Harvey continues in this vein noting that homeownership replaces class identity with a property based one. In this context, the state functions to restrain the “disintegrating tendencies of money, time and space in the face of the contradictions of capital circulation.” Lack of money for some means they must resort to other methods in order to articulate their territorial privileges.

Labor processes unfold within this context. However, as Harvey notes they tend to divide in two general directions: one that focuses on wages and the other on residential access. Harvey places much of his attention on this latter issue. As with Anthony King’s history of the bungalow, Harvey points out capital accumulation develops in such a commoditized land market. Again, as with King, industrialization, capital mobility, and business profits combine to project the “community of money”; moreover, capital accumulation requires constant growth and the creation of new social wants and needs, just as King’s bungalows supplied a site for this consumerist process. Capital must exert control over labor not only in work but also in consumerism. For Harvey, it appears to be a totalizing and inescapable force. In terms of its relation to the “built environment”, it becomes a central node of struggle as capital and labor battle over “what is good for accumulation and what is good for people.” With this in mind, capitalist forces depend on the obscuring of their own roles in the process.

Harvey applies his theoretical apparatus to Paris under the Second Empire (1850-1870). Without completely retracing every example Harvey marshals one might focus on a few key points. The circulation of capital serves to spread the city outward allowing for small-scale urban development along Paris’ periphery. Utilizing the person of Baron Georges von Haussman as an almost nineteenth century Robert Moses, Harvey attempts to illustrate how what one might call today Haussman’s “urban renewal/redevelopment” policies affected spatial, political and class relations in the city. Circulation of capital allowed Haussman to prevent the divergent interests of this redevelopment from pulling itself apart. Land valuation and rents “increasingly functioned to allocate land to uses according to a distinctly capitalist logic.” Financial systems, as in 20th century America, clearly favored upper and upper middle class interests. Still, though this worked against working class interests, the circulation of capital and growth of peripheral development meant state surveillance suffered.

Interestingly, Harvey portrays Paris in this historical moment similarly to Saskia Sassen’s “global cities” of the 20th century, especially when he speaks of the survival of small scale labor intensive industry in the face of larger commercial enterprises and in reference to economies of agglomeration. Again, as with Sassen’s twentieth century counterparts, gendered labor occupies an important position. Though Sassen notes the “feminization of work” and similar processes, Harvey finds corresponding evidence that women served as key players in the Parisian economy dominating domestic service while supplying cheap labor to manufacturers. Women’s authority came to hold an acknowledged place in the home and through education, much like middle class North American women of the reform movement. However, most women who were unattached to a male figure or patron found themselves at the mercy of a severely gendered employment market. This led to the monetization and commodification of sexual relations and personal liaisons across classes. Prostitution and the various grey social areas around which it organizes emerge as common to Paris and American cities of late nineteenth century.

If Harvey viewed homeownership as a way for dominant forces to invisibly divide class relations, others have noted how the importance of homeownership have expanded on Harvey’s reflections on citizenship and belonging. America’s recent housing crisis occurred in great deal because of the near religious dedication to homeowner ideal, which was and is seen by many as the culmination of freedom, rights, and the American Dream. Ronald Richard’s The Ideology of Home Ownership: Homeowner Societies and the Role of Housing argues that this “religion” serves as ideology, promoting a property-based citizenship that privileges home ownership over public and rental housing. Exploring three Western societies and three East Asian, Ronald argues that “while housing units, systems practices, and traditions are considerably different, home ownership itself is becoming an increasingly evident and significant aspect of global modernity.”

Immediately, Ronald addresses the acceptance of home ownership as a “natural” phenomenon among humanity, noting that “overall owner occupied tenure levels have principally increased in most societies during specific periods of deep government subsidy.” The homeowner identity emerged as the ideal both in terms citizenship, domesticity, and adulthood. Additionally, renters and others have experienced stigmatization and marginalization due to such developments. While globalization’s forces have resulted in the proliferation of home ownership which in turn “restructured” housing systems themselves and the “housing ‘dimension’ of the social structure,” this also contributed to increasing levels of individualization, the “redistribution of risk”, government restructuring, driving shifts or realignments of housing’s centrality such that it now serves as an integral influence on social relations.

The demonization of public housing residents in America exhibits a long history. However, Ronald pushes this discourse further suggesting a possible hierarchy of tenure that places renting just above homelessness. Housing increasingly finds value as a “private market good rather than a social merit good”. This underpins the broader commodification of social relations, with market practices constituted as the best and most appropriate means of welfare provision, and state mediation the least. In this way the state shifts risk from itself to individuals, all while promoting market primacy.

The role of tenure and housing systems in developing social organization and power relations serves as one of Ronald’s primary aims. Ronald wants historians and others to reconsider previous conceptions that conflated homeownership with bourgeois ideology, arguing that it no longer adequately explains “the complex relationships between private housing consumption and socio-ideological practices.” In this way, the extension of homeownership binds “the individual into private property relations, tying them to the prevailing structures and ideologies of capital.” Anthony King, whom Ronald frequently cites, noted similar developments in the transnational spread of the bungalow in terms of its role in capital accumulation, drawing its inhabitants further into wage labor economic system, especially patterns of consumption. Thus, housing also functions as a medium of “economic differentiation.” However, homeowner identities also function to spur political mobilization against both state and non-state actors.

The book’s transnational comparative framework enables it to not only compare Anglo-Saxon societies housing with that of East Asia, but also to explore differences and similarities within these two categorical examples. Thus, while drawing upon similarities, Ronald posits the diversity between all examples. Though Western societies reached mass home ownership through different frameworks and policies (i.e. subsidies, finance systems, and government measures) several “convergent features emerge”. First, “discursive processes and policy development rather than a ‘natural’ phenomenon” explain this growth. Second, housing discourses, tenure policy, and “hegemonic features” illustrate an “apparent” relationship. Third, the “ideological significance of homeownership” no longer relates to “building social conservative hegemonies” as it is in reorienting … households” toward neo-liberal markets and policies. Since homeowners transform into market consumers and subjects, the freedom of markets exerts a central influence since “the constitution of houses as market objects demands that the most effective form of provision depends on the freedom of markets, and state interventions which undermine the market, such as the provision of public housing, is undesirable.”

In contrast to the Anglo Saxon examples, their East Asian counterparts do not exhibit a property-based citizenship nor do they transform home owners into subjects of neoliberalism. In general, housing “policies have primarily constituted housing as a market object and oriented housing subjects around patterns of family consumption and family based welfare” Nor does individualism exert the kind of influence as seen in Anglo Saxon societies; instead, homeownership in these East Asian societies “emphasized particular forms of social mainstream subjectivity.” On a more macroeconomic level, East Asian “welfare capitalism relies on more hegemonic social practices based on rapid economic growth.” Though great differences exist in terms of welfare schemes, political groups, and modernization patterns, they do share a productivist welfare orientation regime that attempts to achieve greater social equity while fulfilling welfare responsibilities through “economic growth.” The state intervenes but “with market based consumption”. In comparison to western societies, the East Asian model emphasizes the family as welfare provider, which in turn has relied more and more on access to property, specifically housing. This housing increasingly depended on further economic growth for higher valuations. Homeownership in Japan, Hong Kong, and Singapore all unfolds within an ideological conception that postulates homeownership as a means to economic and social objectives. Historical contingencies that affect built environment and economics such as those pointed out by contributors to Of Cities and States, Globalizing Cities, and Cities and Third World Development emerge as well. Singapore and Hong Kong’s histories each endured colonialism.

In general - though especially in Anglo Saxon nations - home ownership practices transferred the focus from the government to the market. Numerous discourses then work to “restructure dwelling subjects around housing objects in terms sympathetic to the operation of markets.” Still, East Asian nations treat housing and education as public goods with housing also serving as the source of family wealth. Moreover, in this context, the home as capital accumulation “facilitates” spending and welfare practices, while education operates to increase “human capital,” enhancing family wealth and consumption. Thus, the demand for universal rights or decommodified social welfare fail to develop. Ultimately, three basic convergences emerge between East and West, the first being the importance of “political sponsorship in successfully establishing a home ownership system.” The second regards normative discourses that posit individual homeownership as natural, “connected to a cultural owner-occupier heritage” . This normalization may prove more critical than ideologies. Though the function and content of ideologies in relation to consumption differ, a connection between home ownership, conservatism, middle class formation, and social stability operates as a central feature of social and political discourses. Ronald points out the key insight that increasingly Anglo Saxon governments look to owner occupied households and the capital accumulation therein as a “means to support the reduction of welfare services, erode state pension provision and undermine universal welfare rights.” In contrast, East Asian societies have embraced reduced state intervention and control over housing and housing markets, while extending some social security benefits. Still, the emphasis on asset accumulation within the home as a way to subvert welfare funding and provisions suggests, as Ronald points out, a meeting of East and West in the middle.

== Conclusion ==

Telecommunication and financial innovations of the last 30 years have helped to accelerate processes that increased the scale of globalization. Moreover, the increasingly urbanized world illustrates the need for scholars to understand and examine the motives behind migration and immigration along with the very people who participate in the movement. Historians and social scientists in recent years have begun to address these new developments, especially through urban and metropolitan networks. This transnational framework addresses numerous issues and methodologies. The sociology of Sassen, the anthropology of Roy, and the history of McKewon all serve to address the various aspects of globalization’s processes. Transnational capital flows alter economic and spatial relationships which manifest themselves in countless ways. While the nation-state may have declined in its ability to control populations, it remains a relevant force directing investment and spatialization. Therefore, the need to understand the interplay between state and non-state actors in the advanced and developing worlds emerges as a pivotal concept. The role the state plays in privileging, harnessing, and dealing with transnational actors and flows of peoples, goods, and capital requires an understanding that incorporates interdisciplinary research. No one field can address all the complexities that an accelerated globalization has wrought.

'''Ryan Reft'''

Transnationalism and Urban Networks: An Introduction

2012-06-21T01:47:40Z

KevinBaker: Created page with "Transnationalism and Urban Networks: An Introduction The expansion of transnational studies greatly enhanced history and social science’s ability to grasp the complexities and..."

Transnationalism and Urban Networks: An Introduction

The expansion of transnational studies greatly enhanced history and social science’s ability to grasp the complexities and interdependence of the world’s metropolises. The transnational flows of capital, goods, ideas, and labor - representing only a handful of numerous other examples - have always existed. However their scope, speed and scale have been enhanced. Economically, transnational capital movements through “Global Cities” unhinge such cosmopolitan centers form their national and regional connections. In developing nations, emerging cities illustrate spatializations reminiscent of America’s nineteenth century metropolises. Slums in Rio, Mumbai, and Lagos represent such spatializations, where a transnational, national, or local elite occupies central areas in which housing and security abound, while its middle and lower classes struggle through varying levels of slum existence. Polarization within the workforce plagues rich and developing nations alike as transnational producer services and banking/insurance industries contribute to a developing white collar workforce, whose own consumer needs employ low level wage labor with a declining middle class serving as an increasingly thin buffer.

This economic polarization expresses itself spatially as many urban areas feature communities segregated by income and race, while also finding expression in the built environment of cities reflecting social, economic, and political processes unfolding within these municipalities. Nor is such polarization confined to the city limits. Rather, suburban and metropolitan areas illustrate a similar dynamic, as the expansion of homeownership ideologies and concurrent discourses that conflate free markets with freedom have resulted in several Western and East Asian societies privileging property-based citizenship over more civic oriented ideals.

The reorientation of history and social sciences with greater attention to transnational frameworks has been recounted numerous times, but essentially the deregulation of international and national markets throughout the 1980s and 1990s and the institutionalization of globalization through agreements like NAFTA forced many to address growing multinational connections that seemed more relevant or visible than in previous decades. Additionally, many works in the transnational field have adopted or employed theoretical frameworks that previous diplomatic historians largely ignored. The world’s expanding urbanization and increased transnational flows of peoples, goods, capital, and ideas have necessitated the conception of new urban networks socially, politically, and economically. Additionally, the application of cultural studies further broadened historical and social scientific studies. The interconnectedness of these approaches enabled scholars to push against back ideas of national exceptionalism, acknowledging that nations and peoples have developed in greater relation to each other than previously thought.

I. Global Networks, Capital Flows and Cities

Though not necessarily beginning in the 1980s, but certainly central to academic inquiry and subsequently popular discourse, tropes regarding globalization emerged in relation to the world’s urban areas. Robert Cohen’s “The New International Division of Labor, Multinational Corporations and Urban Hierarchy” (1981) and John Friedmann and Goetz Wolff’s “World City Formation: Agenda for Research and Action” (1982) serve as two examples of this development. While Cohen explored the new hierarchy of urban areas based on their areas of service/industrial specialization, Friedmann and Goetz applied Cohen’s NIDL to world cities which they argued represented “a new breed of global command and control centers within the new international division of labor.” Contemporary and future urban scholars such as Saskia Sassen, Peter Marcuse, and Ronald Van Kempen among many others explored the spatial, economic, and social ramifications of these developments.

Following the impact of his 1982 collaboration with Goetz, Friedmann’s 1986 article “The World City Hypothesis” built upon earlier works by Saskia Sassen, David Harvey, and Manuel Castells. Friedman’s “world city” hypothesis gained momentum throughout the 1980s as some authors built upon or modified his conclusion’s while others viewed the world city system more skeptically as a tool used by municipalities and corporate interests to employ development policies that favored multinational and local business interests. “The World City Hypothesis” emerged as one the earlier works to connect cities to the world economy, especially in regard to the resulting spatial aspects. Moreover, Friedmann’s article never implied any hard and fast conclusions but served as a starting point for further debate.

Friedmann credits David Harvey and Manuel Castells with revolutionizing how scholars thought about urbanization. “Their special achievement was to link city forming processes to the larger historical movement of industrial capitalism … City no longer viewed as organic but rather a product of specifically social forces set in motion by capitalist relations of production. Class conflict became central to the new view of how cities evolved.” The connection between Friedmann’s work and Sassen’s appears even more stark. Not only does Friedmann reference Sassen’s work on several occasions, but Sassen’s subsequent research built upon many of his main arguments.

Seven basic assertions form the locus of Friedmann’s world city hypothesis. First, structural changes in cities will find themselves related to “the form and extent of the city’s integration with the world economy.” Within this factor, Friedmann notes the influence of “endogenous conditions” such as national policy toward immigration, policies such as South Africa’s Apartheid, and referencing Anthony King, “the spatial patterns of historical accumulation”. Here, as among others Peter Marcuse and Ronald van Kempen (Of States and Cities and Globalizing Cities) suggest, the historical background of cities impact subsequent developments. Second, certain cities function in part as tools of “global capital”, operating as “’basing points’ in the spatial organization and articulation of production and markets.” Linkages created by such conditions arrange cities into a “complex spatial hierarchy.” Third, the functions of “world cities” manifest themselves in the “structure and dynamics of their production sectors and employment”. Fundamentally, Friedmann suggests that the concentration of corporate headquarters, international finance, global transport/communications, and high level business services contribute to economic growth for both upper level workers and low wage laborers but also operate ideologically, as metropolises like New York, Los Angeles and Paris “are centers for the production and dissemination of information, news, entertainment and other cultural artifacts.” Additionally, as such areas draw increasing immigration, the informal economy expands since its formal counterpart cannot absorb them. This point relates another aspect of world cities: their role as a point of destination for migrants and immigrants.

Friedmann’s final three hypotheses focus more directly on transnational economic flows and their subsequent effects on urban populations and spatialization. First, global cities provide a location for the “concentration and accumulation of international capital.” While some nations and cities drew benefits from this development, others developed increasing amounts of international debt, which ultimately damaged their positions. Second, for all their economic growth, world cities illustrate the contradictions of industrial capitalism, the most notable being “spatial and class polarization”. The demise of unionized employment and its replacement with non-unionized personal/consumer services (domestics, boutiques, restaurants, entertainment) and low wage manufacturing (electronics, garments, prepared foods) further polarizes income and space as these burgeoning areas are juxtaposed with financial/business services. Under such pressures, middle-income earners appear to be a shrinking demographic. Finally, the costs of world city status often outweighs the “fiscal capacity of the state” which results in continuing “fiscal and social crisis” that bedevil municipal governments. The economic infrastructure desired by transnational capital and social reproduction supported by elites serve as dominant forces in state policy/actions. Thus, “the burden of capitalist accumulation is systematically shifted to the politically weakest, most disorganized sectors of the population.” Police repression in the name of both corporate and state interests further marginalize poorer residents.

Friedmann’s two articles exuded a strong influence but several other scholars also contributed vital insights. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Saskia Sassen published two works that led to widespread debate and discussion among academics. The first, The Mobility of Labor and Capital: A Study in International Investment and Labor Flow, focuses on the impact of transnational space on capital and labor. The second, The Global City, postulates that the transnational/international economies of globalization required urban nodes with dense infrastructures of telecommunications, specialization, and producer services (accounting, engineering, IT, business law and the like) to control and manage the dizzying array of financial products, instruments, and capital mobility. The two works illustrate a continuity of themes and focus, including the effects of foreign direct investment (FDI) on local economies and its role in the subsequent internationalization of production, the creation of both high level specialized producer services and low level wage employment (often in consumer services or in support of producer services and their workers), and the growth of “high tech” cities.

First, changes in FDI shifted the destination of such investments. If Latin America’s share declined, America’s rose to a great degree due to Japan’s capital infusion (Southeast Asia also experienced increases as well). With FDI comes an increased transnationalization of production. Export Processing Zones (EPZs) facilitate the movement of labor into various global regions (the U.S./Mexico border serves as one obvious example) but of equal importance are the multinational, diplomatic, and military linkages established by creation of such institutions; these linkages facilitate immigration. Here, Sassen pushes back against the traditional narrative that suggests poverty spurs such labor movements. Instead, Sassen argues that though poverty serves as one push factor, these linkages provide another. Culturally dominant, they establish labor flows to the nations from which they originate. Sassen points to examples such as South Korea where immigration to the US expanded significantly despite the nation’s own economic success. “Isolated” nations or those lacking the linkages Sassen points out illustrate lower rates of immigration. This helps to explain in part, “the contradiction between the existence of labor shortages and the existence of large unemployment worldwide … “ Additionally, Sassen notes the markedly gendered nature of these immigration/labor flows, as newer countries such as China, South Korea, Colombia, Jamaica and the Dominican Republic feature heavily female flows while “traditional immigration countries such as Italy, Portugal and Greece have mostly males.” While such divisions are relevant, Sassen notes a key aspect of this “new” immigration, “is the increase in the supply of female immigrant workers”. Providing a more quantitative sociological approach than Ananya Roy’s City Requiem, Sassen points to the very feminization of poverty and wage labor others like Roy or Nicolas De Genova have explored from more cultural anthropological perspectives. Sassen acknowledges similar developments connecting them more broadly.

Third, Sassen suggests immigration’s affect on wages may be less severe than some argue. Though she addresses this argument in greater detail in The Global City, Sassen suggests immigrants do not drive down wages or cause the casualization of labor but rather find themselves situated well to take advantage of such opportunities which arise out of structural changes. Similarly, such developments result in the increasing employment of immigrant labor in service industries.

Fourth, one easily identifies the seeds for Sassen’s later work Global City. Previewing many of her insights, Sassen notes that cities such as New York and Los Angeles feature the dual growth of labor intensive small scale industries along with an increasingly large consumer services market. Again, Sassen pushes back against many of the traditional beliefs regarding urban economies. In this context, immigration provides some relief to such sectors offering “a solution to the cheap labor question”, thus allowing struggling industries to remain competitive. Sassen’s new economy creates jobs at the producer service level but also at the low wage end of the spectrum. Middle income employment declines resulting in “the increasing polarization of the occupational and income distribution in the labor force.” However, Sassen cautions scholars to consider carefully the meaning of this expansion of low wage employment, “the available evidence for New York City shows that a majority of immigrants find employment in rather low wage jobs. The mistake lies in assuming that low wage jobs are predominantly a function of decline and backwardness.” The decentralization of office work, mechanical decentralization, and the international flow of producer and some consumerist services have contributed to the increasing importance of global nodes such as New York.

Following The Mobility of Labor and Capital, The Global City: New York, London, and Tokyo sparked debates across disciplines and fields. Sassen argues that the forces of technological/telecommunication innovation, globalization, and the decline of Fordism combined to deepen dependencies on “global cities” such as New York and Tokyo. The dispersal and decentralization that the telecommunications boom was to usher in actually contributed to a centralization process for finance in several global nodes organizing increasingly decentralized production sites. Producer services came to dominate urban economies while their employees gentrified various communities across each metropolitan area. However, with this growth came polarization.

The Global City embraces four primary themes. First, “territorial decentralization of economic activity” failed to distribute business and profits more broadly. Rather, global cities find themselves increasingly serving as powerful international financial centers. Second, Sassen places great importance on how these economies order cities internally. Here Sassen shifts to a focus on markets and the financial industry. Sassen does not discount the importance of corporations or banks but notes the striking shift toward financial investments altered various social, political, and spatial structures. Third, questions regarding the effect of global cities on the various national networks in which they situate themselves.

Others scholars such as Peter Marcuse and Ronald Van Kempen (Globalizing Cities: A New Spatial Order?) have suggested that fundamentally cities’ spatial order remains continuous in many respects. Sassen’s emphasis on economic changes argues that though this growth remains connected to a declining manufacturing base, it has altered the spatial dynamics of global cities. Though as with other scholars, Sassen designates the early 1970s as the shift away from Fordism towards a new economic reality, she also notes the importance of the 1982 debt crisis which brought numerous changes to the industry while increasing the “concentration in and orientation toward major financial centers…" According to Sassen, a key to this transformation rests on the proliferation of and investment in financial instruments which have maximized the movement of capital, increasing the activity of “investors and borrower around the world”. During the 1980s, markets seemed to have wielded a rhetorical and economic strength not previously accorded. In relation, this has meant that financial centers have become the key location for “intermediation functions” Thus, what she labels as the “organizational complexity” of internationalized finance can only be supplied by the dense “social connectivity” of urban networks, and the accumulation of firms and markets preset in urban “financial centers” like New York.

As noted, though The Global City focuses extensively on markets, financial instruments, transnational credit flow and the like, it also attempts to examine the spatial consequences of these developments, “Different types of economic growth promote different types of social forms.” If post-WWII Fordism generated a large middle class through industrial employment that encouraged consumption, which in turn fed the economic growth of the period, modern economic value lay in the creation and control over scientific knowledge, meaning that the beneficiaries of this new paradigm resemble not the expansive post war middle class of the 1950s, but the technocratic college educated professional. Women especially have benefited from new developments, ironically, gentrifying communities in each city as job opportunities previously denied or non-existent surfaced to enable their influence to be felt economically and socially. Women have replaced the suburban middle class lifestyle with a more urbane ideal. Likewise, Sassen points out, more so in New York and London than Tokyo, that immigration has produced a sort of low cost gentrification as older decaying neighborhoods have been inhabited and refurbished by England’s and America’s newcomers. Yet, for such positives Sassen also notes the negative polarization that has led to a “dual city” or what others some might call “layered”. For Sassen, gentrification is not a new process but the scale under which it unfolds is. Gentrification’s manifestations differ in each of the three cities: New York’s bears witness to the rise of an “informal market” for both labor and goods, Japan’s unmoored rural workers such that a system that once offered some protection offers less creating a mobile but impoverished workforce, and London’s government privatized numerous services once supplied by the municipality itself.

In 2000, Richard Child Hill and June Woo Kim offered a corrective to Sassen’s global city examples. In “Global Cities and Developmental Sates: New York, Tokyo, and Seoul”, Hill and Kim argue that Sassen incorrectly couched cities such as Seoul and Tokyo with New York and Los Angeles. While the latter feature free market deregulatory federal and municipal governments, Tokyo and Seoul’s governments intervene to a far greater extend in labor, economic, and housing markets. Moreover, Seoul and Tokyo governments find themselves under the influence of bureaucratic and national elites rather than the transnational variant. As well each serves as a center for “indigenous not foreign companies, and their international infrastructure is primarily rooted in state ministries and bureaus, not in private finance and producer service firms.” Other significant differences exist, but Hill and Kim emphasize the point that much of world systems theory and global city conceptualization argues for a diminished, less relevant state. Tokyo and Seoul challenge this viewpoint suggesting “the economic base, spatial organization and social structure of the world’s major cities are strongly influenced by the national development model and regional context in which each city is embedded.”

II. Cities, States and Spatialization

Though Sassen, Friedmen, Hill, and Kim all address aspects of spatialization, they do so as a secondary goal in illustrating world system functions. Additionally, with the notable exception of Hill and Kim, Friedman and Sassen downplay the presence of state actors. Instead, Peter Marcuse, Ronald Van Kempen and several others have explored the recent spatial history and processes of cities along with the role of the nation state.
As mentioned, over the past several decades urbanization in the developing nations increased exponentially. Scholars have provided numerous explanations for this growth. Cities and Development in the Third World attends to one aspect of Third World urbanization and development, and as such places the nation-state at the forefront of discussion. Though certainly not theoretical in the sense of Michael Foucault or Antonio Gramsci, editors Robert B. Potter and Ademola T. Salau seek to reorient the study of cities in developing nations, encouraging historians and others to consider the importance of informal economies, reject Western imposed ideas/modes of development, place greater faith in indigenous solutions, and acknowledge the role of national and local states in Third world development.

Published in 1990, Cities and Development reflects the influence of contemporary events and shifts in the profession. Several themes that emerged prominently by the mid 1990s among many historians are in evidence here. Potter’s contribution “Cities, Convergence, Divergence and Third World Development” encourages scholars to “avoid false schisms” like the urban/rural dichotomy. Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, urban historians sought to do just this. Ananya Roy’s City Requiem, Calcutta: Gender and the Politics of Poverty serves as only one recent example, as Roy explored squatter settlements and migration’s spatial and political relations. Additionally, H.A.C. Main’s “Housing Problems and Squatting Solutions in Metropolitan Kano” provides an African example of one of Roy’s central points, that squatter settlements provide governments with political constituencies and mobilization while also supplying labor to the local economy. However, Roy’s work differs from Potter and Salau’s collection in that Cities and Development, with the possible exception of Potter’s second contribution, “Shelter in Urban Barbados, West indies: Vernacular Architecture, Land Tenure and Self Help”, focuses strictly on economic, demographic, and political developments. Cultural aspects or gender considerations receive virtually no attention.

Still, in other ways, Potter and Salau’s work reinforces other developments among transnational writers. For example, as David Harvey and Arjun Appadurai (whom at least one writer cites here) have cautioned that writers, developers, and others must resist imposing Western oriented answers.
From a broader viewpoint, Cities and Development’s authors illustrate the pervasive urban bias that development plans emphasize. The crisis of rural economies has not been the focus of most government efforts. Moreover, as Roy and several articles in Globalizing Cities note, the colonial histories of various Third World cities remain deeply influenced by their former occupiers. K. Sita and M. Chatterjee utilize this framework to examine “metropolitan dominance in India” while David Drakakis Smith points out the negative economic and health influences colonialism had on “urban food distribution systems.”

The importance of the informal economy serves as another theme. Potter observes that the sheer size and growth of the informal market as an alternative to over extended states requires historians to reevaluate the role of such markets in the developing world. Potter’s quote points to the very economic developments that Roy emphasizes have contributed to the “feminization of livelihood.”

Finally, transnational historians might take Potter and Salua to task. Though the work covers a wide geographic range, much of it remains nation state bound. Some of the articles maintain an interiority in their analysis. Multinationals, and international economic organizations such as the IMF receive scant attention. Additionally, as already noted, cultural aspects or gender considerations remain absent.

Globalizing Cities: A New Spatial Order? explores how several broad categories (race/racism, globalization, migration, new demographics, changing role of public sector, changing and patterns of choice) have affected the formation of six basic “spatial divisions”: citadels, gentrified neighborhoods, suburbs, working class areas, ethnic enclaves, and exclusionary ghettos. Contributors studied cities from around the world including Singapore, Tokyo, Calcutta, New York, Brussels, Frankfurt, and Rio Di Janeiro. As a sum of its parts, the work embraces a transnational comparative approach.

Marcuse and Van Kempen put forth a general hypothesis regarding the development of urban metropolises since the 1970s. Acknowledging that cities have always illustrated divisions along cultural, functional and economic lines, the current pattern “is a new and in many ways deeper going combination of these divisions”. No uniform model exists such that each city manifests these changes differently but in general the new spatial order’s basic features “included a spatial concentration within cities of a new urban poverty on the one hand, and of specialized 'high level' internationally connected business activities on the other, with increasing spatial divisions not only between each of them, but also among segments of the 'middle class' in between.” Social and physical boundaries providing the separation have proliferated and hardened. Though many of these developments are market driven the state plays a significant and key role. If it can create these conditions, it can also erase them.

The contributors provide numerous key insights into global urban development. First, significant differences exist between Third World urban development and that of the U.S. and Western Europe. Racial spatialization in the form of “ghettoes of exclusion” have been thought to be a U.S. phenomena but Western Europe’s infusion of immigrants, retreat of state welfare, and structural economic changes point to a similar future. In contrast, Third World cities exhibit a very different spatialization. For example, Sanjoy Chakravorty’s essay on Calcutta revealed that though ghettoes exist, they “are not large … and this spatial pattern is not confined to the poor …” Moreover, the historical contingency of post-colonialism re-oriented the organization of the city unlike its Western counterparts. Divisions rest more on class than race.

Second, the conceptualization of the city as an organic whole entity fails to impress the editors. Rather they argue the cities remain layered entities that remain spatially and temporally divided. Residents of different classes, races, and ethnicities may use the same spaces but not at the same time and not for the same purposes. Marcuse and van Kempen use the layered city metaphor noting that each space has residential layer, a work layer, a transportation layer and so on. This reality requires greater attention to the conceptualization of urban environments.

Marcuse and van Kempen encourage the state to become more intimately involved. The example of Singapore illustrates that state intervention can alter isolating spatializations (and seems to support Hill and Kim’s conclusions regarding the importance of the state in spatial and economic structures). Of course, the editors caution the development of negative ghettoization, in which the state forces residents “to live where they do not wish [in some cases] away from those with whom they would like to be near.” The weaknesses of Globalizing Cities' approach lay in the fact that 1) spatialization occurs as result of many factors that are not spatial and 2) the numerous contingencies between examples in a comparative approach complicates generalizations.

Building on their 2000 work, Marcuse and van Kempen challenged transnational discourses that devalued government power. In contrast to narratives that diminish the nation-state, Marcuse and van Kempen reassert the role of the state in urban spatial developments. Moreover, Of States and Cities stresses the multiplicity of interests and government powers to illustrate that a monolithic view of government proves myopic. Here they return to expand on their previous conceptions of city’s partitions, “attempting to define in orderly fashion such terms as ‘ghetto’, ‘enclave’, ‘citadel’ …” For Marcuse, van Kempen, and many of the work’s other contributors “the state has been a dominant force in creating and enforcing partitions” but economic forces have provided a parallel influence.

Throughout history, cities have displayed levels of partitioning, but the forces behind such divisions do not remain static. If class, ethnicity or race, serve as foundations for urban partitions in the modern city, its historical antecedents often divided early burgeoning metropolises along culture, status, and function. However, the conflict between function and status haunts cities for centuries. Marcuse points out that functional and cultural differences “are in general voluntary, divisions by status are not.” Thus, “state partitioning” of communities especially along cultural, class, or racial lines threatens democratic developments. Of note, Marcuse acknowledges that while “racial segregation was an accompaniment of citadel formation” the two were not identical as status in colonial cities grew out of both economic and political significance. Moreover, spatially these ghettoes lacked the exclusionary aspect of Fordist and Post-Fordist cities, “ghettos in colonial cities were economically integrated with the societies in which they existed.” The rise of capitalism altered spatialization patterns as markets became the main arbiter. The role of the state in spatialization changed with these developments. Government and quasi government powers effectively reinforced these spatialized divisions. Post Fordist cities increasingly removed manufacturing and industry from the city center, moving them to the periphery. The growth of edge cities, suburbs and the like grew in relation. Additionally, one can also designate similar growth in citadels and exclusionary ghettoes. Finally, socialist cities emerged with a spatialization that in theory avoided segregation by class and race but in practice failed to achieve such ends. In fact, the decline of the Fordist economies along with the demise of the USSR resulted in post-communist cities undergoing even more intense polarization.

Of States and Cities includes essays (besides those mentioned above) on Sao Paulo, Istanbul, Britain, Holland, and the role of place in social and advance marginality. Though each offers unique perspectives on their various topics, a few generalizations might be made. For example, the retreat of many governments from the welfare state has meant that in nations such as Holland where class and ethnic diversity in various communities was not uncommon, more market based approaches have shifted municipal funding from social housing (rentals) to ownership, resulting in greater class/ethnic polarization. Each has displaced segments of the population. Likewise, formerly communist cities like Budapest and those in Poland display similar stratifications as former anti-communists benefited from the collapse of communism but new spatial patterns have reduced egalitarianism, creating metropolises that while imperfect under socialism, emerge as increasingly polarized by class and ethnicity today.

Not all cities are global, and many remain subject to state pressures. The spatialized effects of 1950s and 60s central planning in England and the Non-Plan movement that responded to it serve as the focus of Non-Plan: Essays on Freedom, Participation and Change in Modern Architecture. In his contribution to this collection of essays, Chinedu Umenyilora explores the promise and feasibility of “self-build” – the policy allowing people in developing countries to construct their own homes — closing with a remark that encapsulates much of Non-Plan’s approach: “There is uncertainty as to whether one can effectively design good communities, but we can assist and enable communities to design themselves.” Umenyilora underscores much of the Non-Plan movement’s intentions while acknowledging its faults.

Emerging in the mid-late 1960s through the journal New Society (“a weekly magazine of social inquiry” established in 1962), writers such as Peter Hall, Paul Barker, Reyner Banham, Cedric Price among others put forth an iconic issue known as Non-Plan. Provoking outrage and indignation among urban planners and architects, Non-Plan dismissed centralized urban planning as beset with damaging consequences. What the field claimed to be innovations were really repacked plans from earlier decades and centuries, “The point is to realize how little planning and the accompanying architecture have changed. The whole ethos is doctrinaire; and if something good emerges it is a bit of a bonus.” Instead, the writers advocated a free wheeling development dictated by local communities rejecting the values or intentions of planners: “physical planners have no right to set their value judgment up against yours, or indeed anyone else’s. If the Non Plan experiment works really well, people should be allowed to build what they like. Agency for communities and individuals from the state emerged as one the movement’s central tenets, establishing what Peter Hall called participatory architecture. Non-Plan allowed for freedom but offset such liberties with a cost, paid for by those benefiting from such developments. Reacting to centralized urban planning, Non-Plan practitioners demanded greater community involvement encouraging the architectural profession to change its ways, becoming as much facilitators as designers. Social engineering through architecture and planning emerged as anathema to Non-Planners who refuted such efforts arguing “architectural schemes associated with Modernism, and which were designed to resolve social problems exacerbated them.”

Of course, as several contributors to this collection of essays notes, Non-Plan, though perceived as a fundamentally centre-left enterprise at the time, has been appropriated by conservative forces pressing market-based deregulated development and the like. Though critical of the urban planning and architectural professions, Non-Plan failed to consider the strength of capitalist economies to dictate development and building standards. Ben Franks addresses this subject in his essay “New Right/New Left,” arguing that the late development of a formal New Right movement allowed many future conservatives to remain tied to a broad New Left that was beginning to fragment. The rise of squatting illustrated the more conservative elements of the Non-Plan approach: “Social divisions and hierarchies were rejected by the squatters but not by the planners (who wanted to save their professional role) or the Non-Planners (who wanted to keep the division between those who build and the consumer who will use the building). The division of labour and primacy of the individual as consumer was also maintained by Hayek.” Other contributors such as Clara Greed suggest, even Non-Plan reified binaries such as man/women and plan and non-plan, clouding alternative approaches with false frameworks or ways of thinking about planning. Simon Sandler acknowledges the nominal impact Non-Plan has had on construction practices but does note its influence on more avant-garde planning and architectural approaches. Ultimately, Sadler applauds Non-Planner efforts to undermine fixity and monumentalism, but he laments its inability to transcend the academic: “the relationship between architecture and event became in turn reified. Non-planning’s ambition to create ‘event spaces’ and new types of living was sincere, but its legacy was very largely one of tremendous images, representations and simulations of architecture as a process.” In fact, Sadler labels Non-plan an extreme expression of “modernism’s ‘openness’” as it placed overwhelming faith in “a slightly fantastical imagining of contemporary society as one of the exponential economic growth, liberalization, and technical innovation … “ while attempting “to make architecture seem relevant by subjecting it to the vicissitudes of the moment rather than the solid ground of Gestalt …. “

Johnathan Hughes comes to similar conclusions in his evaluation of architectural practices and concerns following Non-Plan’s emergence. Though acknowledging increased attention by architects to alternative solutions and to promoting agency for the public, the responses to Non-Plan were often “contradictory and occasionally ineffectual …” Critical of the urbanism built on automobility promoted by Banham (Los Angeles: The Architecture of the Four Ecologies) and the authors of Learning from Las Vegas: The Forgotten Symbolism of the Architectural Form , Hughes argues “it was urbanism for those with mobility and the resources to consume.” Hughes points out that Non-Plan’s “leave cities alone” approach found allies in the Thatcher government who put “laissez faire ‘enterprise zones’” into practice. Of which Hughes documents the London Docklands Development Corporation (LDDC) which from 1980 on resulted in testimony to the failures of free market non-planning efficiency as the area resembles an ugly melding of architectural styles built on short term self interest. Moreover, in an American context this idea of “hands off urban areas” meshed well with shrinking federal aid to American metropolitan regions.

Non- Plan: Essays on Freedom Participation and Change in Modern Architecture and Urbanism re-evaluates the controversial Non-Plan movement of the 1960s. Though the movement’s intentions lay in promoting agency, freedom, and a participatory architecture in the face of an overbearing state backed urban planning system, its libertarian impulses found themselves appropriated by conservative forces. Its impact on more experimental forms, representations, and simulations remained more prominent than its tangible results in construction, though it at least helped to encourage developers and planners to consider alternative approaches and to listen more attentively, even if not devolving much power to the public. Non-Plans critics suggest, its largest failures as movement reside in its naïve optimism regarding economic expansion, faith in technocratic leadership, and unconscious acceptance of capitalist market based norms. As the opening quote suggests, Non-Plan placed faith in the individual and the community to plan their own development but its own libertarian approach encouraged capital flow dominance and conservative appropriation, which may or may not have served the very interest Non-Plan hoped to promote.

III. Migration and Urban Networks

Though transnational capital and global systems theory help understand complex economic factors, they often fail to explore the specificity of spatialization and its political, economic, and social consequences. Granted, the aforementioned works by Marcuse and van Kempen investigate developing urban spatializations, but they stop short of a cultural analysis. Few of the previously discussed scholars, examine the effects of race, class, gender, and their intersections at the ground level. Instead, other disciplines have served to fill this breach most notably in this section, anthropologists Ananya Roy and Nicolas De Genova and urban planner/architect Ney dos Santos Oliveira.

Ney dos Santos Oliveira, a professor of Architecture and Planning utilized a transnational comparative framework in 1996 article ““Race and Class in Rio de Janeiro and New York City” in order to examine the relationship between race and class in the establishment and proliferation of Brazilian favelas and American ghettos. “Political empowerment” of residents serves as a special point of focus for Oliveira. Like Ananya Roy’s recent work on squatters and commuter women, Oliveira hopes to excavate the potential and reality of political mobilization for both spatial communities (favelas and ghettos). Perhaps surprisingly, Oliveira concludes that despite diminished funding (in comparison with their American counterparts), Rio’s favelas organize more effectively, remain independent from state co-option which enables broader progressive movements. Moreover, favelas focus on class identity facilitates broader alliances but also allow for the maintenance of a racial identity for participants.

Brazil’s history of urban spatialization differs sharply from the United States. Slavery, more widespread throughout the country rather than confined to a region as in the US, meant that racial spatial patterns following Brazil’s gradual emancipation lacked the polarized racial demographics of the U.S. Additionally, favelas have long illustrated a more diverse racial and class integration than American ghettos. From the 1930s through the 1970s, both the U.S. and Brazil engaged in urban development plans that resulted in similar failures as far less affordable housing was constructed than expected. With new external factors such as globalization, Oliveira wants to know ““if social mobilization is strongly and decisively dependent on spatial concentration.” In moments, Oliveira echoes ideas put forth by Saskia Sassen in The Mobility of Capital and Labor. Oliveira suggests that the concentration of class based identities in favelas provides them a special political power, much like the proportionally small but dense immigrant communities of Sassen’s work that enable such populations to wield political power despite their smaller numbers . Moreover, globalization contributes to an economic polarization that further divides Rio and New York. This new relationship between capital and labor require scholars to reevaluate the “categories of race and class”. If many American communities such as those featuring former public housing in Chicago have begun the long process of gentrification, so too have favelas endured this process as middle class Brazilians move into many, pushed further out by rising land prices.

Though Oliveira concludes that community favela movements’ effectiveness exceeds similar efforts by their American counterparts , both too often organize around service delivery for political mobilization. Ultimately, both movements need more “comprehensive political agendas” exceeding race and class while defining their goals “on the basis of critical emancipatory particiapation.”

The movement of peoples often leads to discourses that totalize or reduce identities. For example, when discussing “Hispanics” or Latinos, such designations lump together numerous and diverse nationalities that frequently differ politically and socially. Chicago’s Mexican and Puerto Rican communities provide a useful window into these differences in Nicolas De Genova and Ana Y. Ramos-Zayas’ Latino Crossings: Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and the Politics of Race and Citizenship. Utilizing a collaborative enthnography based on a comparative analytic in which the two anthropologists pooled their field work on the respective Chicago Mexican and Puerto Rican communities, Latino Crossings explores the complex process of identity formation and the difficulties in maintaining Pan-Latino identities. Spatial concerns, most notably each community’s need to stake out there own “neighborhood” in Chicago, provide a source of inquiry. Focusing on the Humbolt Park (Puerto Rican) and Pilsen (Mexican, Mexican American), De Genova and Ramos-Zayas conduct exhaustive ethnographic studies analyzing interviews for discourse and opinions on gender, inter-ethnic relations (most prominently Puerto Rican - Mexican), and race.

Latino Crossings employs a citizenship lens to examine how such issues affect inter-ethnic perceptions and representations. For example, the citizenship status of Puerto Ricans enables some to claim welfare benefits and other state services which numerous Mexicans cannot access because of their lack of citizenship status. However, some in the Mexican community use this example of access to criticize Puerto Ricans as cultureless, lazy, and unproductive. Conversely, some Puerto Ricans accuse Mexicans of sacrificing their self-respect for low paying wage labor in degrading work conditions. Language often thought of as a unifying principle here illustrates how it might also be used to divide. Spanish and English language prowess or lack thereof, among Mexicans and Puerto Ricans is used by each community to critique the social status of the other, pointing to the interethnic tensions at play. The work also explores the complex perceptions of and prejudices toward African Americans that some Puerto Ricans and Mexicans share.

When De Genova and Ramos-Zayos place both communities in a national perspective, they argue that neither translates well to a broader white culture, mitigating attempts at coalitions and alliances. If citizenship gives access to Puerto Ricans toward a declining welfare state that no longer provides an adequate safety net then non-citizenship denies Mexicans legal identities subjecting them to informal labor markets. Both authors followed this work with books on their respective community.

De Genova’s Working the Boundaries built on many aspects of his collaboration with Ramos-Zayos but expanded his research to the transnational level (Latino Crossings exhibited transnational awareness but focused more on each group’s experiences in Chicago) connecting rural Mexico to Chicago to American national immigration policy. Like many other transnational scholars, De Genova wants to disrupt the idea of the nation-state arguing that the border remains a fictive construct. Applying an interdisciplinary approach that employs the work of Henri Lefebvre, Paulo Freire, Marxsm, whiteness studies, post-colonial research, and feminist scholars, De Genova tackles several large issues. As with Latino Crossings, De Genova’s field work consisted of interviews and interactions with students he encountered as an ESL teacher for several Chicago area factories. Working the Boundaries clearly displays De Genova’s central role in the narrative. The class content of his ESL course often developed out the interplay between himself, his student’s interest, and management’s own agenda. In this way, De Genova offers a critique of such programs and their ultimate intentions.
Class relations also serve as a point of focus for De Genova. Racial-class perceptions between Puerto Ricans, Mexicans, Blacks, and poor whites also come into focus. He uses interactions with workers through the language classes to examine such issues but also uncovers ideas of relational identity as many articulate raciality that claims neither blackness or whiteness, while at the same time sometimes maintains a privileged sense of whiteness based on a pronounced anti-black racism.

Critically, De Genova also discusses the construction of “illegality” to criminalize Mexican and Mexican American populations. Though not directly related, De Genova seems to echo David Guitierrez’s landmark work Walls and Mirrors. De Genova notes that this legal production of illegality end up affecting undocumented and documented Mexican nationals and Mexican Americans. Market forces and industrial employers then harness this illegality to manipulate labor pools.

If De Genova explores the use of space and illegality to control labor flows in Mexican Chicago, others have taken his transnational approach and applied it elsewhere. Over the past 30 years, numerous forces have conspired to drive millions of people to cities across the developing world. The increased migration of peoples to Third World cities has resulted in the creation of slums, shanty towns, and squatter settlements. However, debate over the reasons for and the meaning of such developments emerged in the 1960s and 70s but seem particularly relevant today. With this in mind, Ananya Roy’s City Requiem Calcutta : Gender and the Politics of Poverty explores the gendered subjectivities of “distress migration” on female migrant workers through ethnography, public records, and anthropological observation. Roy employs a gender analytic along with a highly theoretical approach that utilizes Antonio Gramsci, Micheal Foucault, and Jiurgen Habermas through Fraser’s “counterpublics”. City Requiem ‘s gendered analytic documents numerous themes regarding the landless migrants of Calcutta’s outskirts including the “feminization of work”, the negotiability of “informality”, and the “double gendering” of settlement life, As opportunities in the countryside remain desperate, increasing numbers of the poor migrate to the cities. With this new “distress migration” comes the proliferation of slums and squatter settlements. Despite the marginality ascribed to both forms of shelter, slum dwellers hold a slightly more secure position in a stratified South Asian society. Roy notes the negotiability of the unmapped Calcutta landscape. This allows both the state and political parities to operate through a “negotiability”, that ensures the existence of squatter settlements to serve state/party interests. The state benefits from the accessible labor while the party utilizes the squatter presence for “political mobilization.” The shifting around of squatters to various areas around Calcutta illustrates this power dynamic. Roy attempts to melt the urban rural divide noting that in her field work she discovered the interconnectedness of squatter settlements and the wider region, “each of my fieldwork sites was a node, an intersection of practices and exchanges that stretched across multiple institutional and physical spaces.” Access to land depended the negotiations of domestic lives. Political sponsorships and local politics generally reflected a masculinized discourse, harnessed often by unemployed men to justify their activities. In contrast, women found themselves subject to work from domestic service to foraging for firewood. Of course, this excludes what many characterize as their “second shift” which involves caring for children, maintaining some sense of family structure. Roy finds that the female networks of support often withered in the face of economic political realities of squatter settlements, though masculinized political systems fared only marginally better. Referring to this as “double gendering” , notes “that [it] inextricably links the feminization of livliehood to the masculinization of politics.” Ultimately, such formations maintain a “persistent poverty” that “must be understood as the knotting of family and regime, a congealing of gender and class hierarchies.”

If gender reveals power dynamics and the hegemonic structures individuals negotiatate daily, Roy’s interaction with the commuter women accomplishes this task well. As mentioned, the “feminization of livliehood” emerges as a significant theme. Moreover, the bodies of women become stand in for nation.
As Laura Briggs in Reproducing Empire or Amy Kaplan in The Anarchy of Empire illustrate the discourse of motherhood creates space for women politically and socially, however, Roy also cautions that it might actually domesticate issues of “community involvement and development.”
The presence of commuter women on Bengal’s trains serves as a disruption of the gender and class hierarchies. Roy pushes further arguing that “the commuter women come to occupy the bourgeois spaces of normalized public, and they do so with a sense of entitlement and belonging.. ” Much like late nineteenth and early twentieth century American “factory girls”, commuter women endure repeated questioning of their sexual character and practices. Roy situates such women as parallels to the figures of African American women in earlier decades. Thus, their work and presence serves as a political act, though masculine discourses frequently attempt to dispute such inferences. In this way, “by emphasizing how the depoliticization of women’s work occurs on a daily basis through the dynamics of masculinest patronage” Roy argues domestications are “negotiated through lived practices” not policies or government agendas. Additionally, Roy reveals ways in which despite their unequal circumstances, that squatters and migrants see their limited participation in “urban informality” as their place in an urban electorate whereas their previous existence in rural areas displayed a perceived lack of such agency. Finally, City Requiem illustrates spatial themes that Globalizing Cities, Cities and Third World Development, and Of States and Cities illustrate, most notably the idea of historical contingency especially for former colonial metropolises. Her use of space and squatter legal legitimacy along with her anthropological field approach appear reminiscent of Working the Boundaries and Latino Crossings. However though both of these latter works engage gender, they fail to focus on it as extensively as City Requiem.

As with the above examples, many social scientists and historians find globalization to be a complicated process that fails to deliver on many of its promises. Like De Genova, Adam McKewon exhibits a skepticism toward nation-states and their borders. McKeown’s Melancholy Order: Asian Migration and the Globalization of Borders pushes back against recent work on globalization. For McKeown, recent work on this trend neglects the historical dynamic of border creation. The lack of nuance in such debates irks McKeown who notes that globalization follows neither a linear path of progression nor a more negative decline into chaos rather it creates new identities and urban networks sometimes in opposition to what may seem to a “homogenizing universalism.” Along the way, McKeown invokes theoretical approaches by Foucault and Jurgen Habermas while paying close attention to the transnational nature of migration policy. American migration policy develops in relation to international events/perceptions and interaction with nation states such as China and Japan. Like Paul Kramer and others, McKeown also notes that the counter flow of imperialized subjects to American shores (Filipinoes, Chinese and so forth) which upset American racial hierarchies contributing to the future independence of the Philippines as anti-imperialists and local labor antagonisms conspired to eliminate future Asian migration by endorsing independence.

Melancholy Order illustrates the influence of new cultural approaches to history. Though it examines juridical examples, government policy, and interaction between government and societal elites, McKeown also explores the discourse around migration and those engaging in such movement. Before 1870, governments explored various migration policies. According to McKeown, a key shift in migration policy occurred in the 1870s when the language of commerce began to overpower the previous language of intercourse. This occurred concurrently with the rise of the nation-state which became both the arbiter and giver of rights. Asian governments established institutions to “enforce free migration” from abuses by “despotic regimes” or “brokers”. In contrast, American policy makers declared all private “organization of migration” illegitimate unless it adhered to government surveillance, thus establishing a pattern of demonization regarding local migration actors and organizations that continues today. Migration never occurred freely. Regulation unfolded either from government officials and workers or previous to a secure nation state, local actors and organizations. This is not to say one was inherently more equitable than the other, however it does illustrate the reality of migration itself as a heavily mediated process.

Asian migrants found themselves caught in a discourse of slavery, corruption, and immorality. Chinese laborers, sometimes referred to as “coolies”, endured conflations with forced labor while many Chinese women were assumed to be licentious and disease ridden. Similarly, Chinese men (followed by Japanese and Filipinoes) were portrayed as opium smoking corrupting womanizers who might sell white women into sexual slavery. If this lacked cultural force, the combination of egalitarian tropes of self government and the distrust of “big capital” further undermined the social and economic position of Asian laborers.

The rise of the nation-state, racism, and economic interest, all influenced conceptions of global movement. However, extraterrioriality and the idea of “civilized states” also contributed significantly to migration policy. “Civilized nations” were accorded greater respect and rights internationally, the presence of extraterritorial rights in one’s other nations served as an indicator of a country’s civilizing deficiencies. Additionally, American mobs attacking Chinese subjects in the U.S. weakened Chinese views of their own government’s efficacy. The failure of China’s government to protect its subjects in some ways undermined its authority, thus officials engaged in self-restriction in an effort to address this issue despite its lack of political strength.

The rise of passports attempted to monitor migration but when its proliferation from numerous sources caused doubts, visas arose. Still, for many observers devices as visas and passports failed to regulate migration flows adequately. Therefore, several Anglo nations incorporated the “race neutral” “Natal Formula” to stem immigration. Even Japan and India adopt their own passport controls over “potential emigrants” signaling “the logic of discrete cultural nations and border control had superseded empire as the most relevant political form for a world of mass mobility.” Moreover by mid century, national economic interest served as both “a globally accepted justification of all forms of migration control, but a foundation for the very understanding of migration and regulation.” Yet, this economic focus obscured the fact that “race and the ideal of self government had worked together to make the national community more attractive than empire as a form of political membership in a modern world of free migration.”

Ultimately, McKeown’s work hopes to prevent a forgetting of past policies, which might very well lead to solutions or migration policy that repeat mistakes of the past while ignoring the nuanced reality of the issue. Anti-Asian migratory controls across empires reveals the seeds of today’s debates. The tools of identification and border control emerged not recently but in the late nineteenth century, continuing to service today in debates over issues of self determination and rights Such language and frameworks developed not recently but last century, having only hardened over tine.

IV. Housing Forms, Homes, and Homeownership

By the early 1980s, writers had also begun to address the meaning of various housing types and the discourses or identities associated with them.
Undoubtedly the free market rhetoric of the 1980s encouraged several scholars to adopt skeptical views of home ownership, seeing in such formations the co-option of residents by free market capitalism. For writers like Anthony King, David Harvey and to a lesser extent Richard Ronald, the home became the site of capital accumulation entwining its inhabitants into a consumerist wage earning existence and recasting cultural-social relations.

Anthony King published The Bungalow: The Production of Global Culture in 1984. King combined an interdisciplinary approach with a transnational perspective, tracing the growth of the “bungalow” from its indigenous existence in India to the colonial appropriations by British imperialists in India and Africa to its North American counterparts, ending with Australia’s adoption. Moreover, like many other historians of the period, King discusses the bungalow in the context of cultural production, economics, politics (notably urban planning), and imperialism.

Beginning with the bungalow’s emergence among India’s people, King illustrates how British imperialists adopted many of its aspects while altering it in various ways. Imperialists utilized the bungalow to house its civil servants and officials ruling India. The spatialization of such housing (externally and internally) effectively helped socially segregate both the British from its Indian subjects but also later for class divisions between Indians themselves. With the onset of the 20th century, Indian elites employed by the British empire as government officials and the expansion of the colonial economy contributed to the growth of an Indian middle class that came to occupy similar housing. Patterns of racial spatialization easily slid into social segregation by class. A key factor in the spread of the bungalow rests on this economic expansion. Bungalows served as a key form of capital accumulation in this context. The bungalow also recast family relations. Extended families in colonial Africa found themselves unable to occupy such housing, forcing the nuclear family formation on peoples who practiced a different set of familial relations.

Yet, the bungalow remained a primarily Indo-British product. Its initial appearance in England revolved around in part changes in the rural economy and the value of rural land due to industrialization and transportation innovations, as well as the result of expanding London businesses and capital mobility. Located predominantly in seaside locations, the bungalow was imbued with health and sanitary ideals stressing the value of nature, sea air, and open green space. Additionally, upper middle class values found expression in the housing form. The prefabrication of the bungalow in early 20th century England resulted in a reorganization of land use and value. As these processes progressed, the cultural forms taking shape around the bungalow emphasized simplicity and a bohemian lifestyle. Government subsidies led to a proliferation in their development. Interestingly, just as the bungalow came to be a possible dwelling for working class English, bourgeoisie critics began to disparage its architectural traits while urban planners made their construction less feasible, ostensibly limiting the lower classes from sharing space with the middle and upper classes.

In North America, the bungalow appealed to reformers (who emphasized space, nature, and gendered spatialization of the interior), feminists (who stressed simplicity and efficiency) and anti-communist tropes that privileged its individualistic aspects over more communal architecture such as apartments. However, post WWII prosperity left the bungalow in dire straits as it was seen as too austere and limiting. The California bungalow drew increased attentions as its cultural form spread far and wide.

As British colonial expansion continued, Africans witnessed the re-importation of the form, which King argues further altered familial structures, social segregation (during and after colonialism), and cultural values. For imperialists it supplied shelter and protection from malaria and other diseases. The imposition of nuclear family structures disrupted more typical extended family arrangements common to Africa. (To be fair, King focuses heavily on Western Africa.) Perhaps, of equal importance, imperialism’s decline did not remove the spatial markers associated with the bungalow. African elites embraced social segregation while firmly placing themselves in the wage-earning sphere of western capitalist expansion. If land had been under a form of collective ownership, the bungalow and the spatial patterns that came with it led to a more individualistic/commercial form. Moreover, western materials and techniques pervaded African housing.

Coming to Australia last, King notes that the world’s smallest continent serves as a control subject, since it lacked a previously built environment and featured a relatively homogenous population. Australia’s lack of development meant it grew wholly from Britain’s economic surplus, or what King calls ‘dependent urbanization’. Moreover, the lack of previous development meant that none were ever industrial nor did they inherit “old preindustrial housing or newer rented ‘industrial’ housing built to accommodate labor close to factories.” Ironically, California’s example rather than Britain’s provided the basic inspiration for Australia’s bungalow proliferation. The bungalow combined with zoning to protect and maintain property values. Australians turned to the bungalow because its artistic individualism and rustic appearance appealed to the capitalist development taking hold.

Ultimately, the bungalow emerged as a form of capitalist accumulation and consumption: new needs from the romantic ideal of newlyweds sharing their first home to the materials required for construction to the consumer products employed within. The bungalow became embedded within a broader ideology that ties individualism to homeownership.

In contrast, Marxist thinker David Harvey focuses less on form and more on space. Harvey wants to limit the privileged position scholars have designated time and history over space and geography. For Harvey, the emphasis on time and history, though valuable, ignores equally important developments: “Historical materialism appeared to license the study of historical transformations while ignoring how capitalism produces its own geography.” Too many works failed to truly conceptualize how “space is produced and how the process of production of space integrate into the capitalist dynamic and its contradictions… ” Harvey’s contribution in Consciousness and the Urban Experience utilizes theory, cultural productions and the “experiences” of Parisians from 1850-1870 to provide a catalog of capitalistic urbanization’s affects and as he noted, contradictions .

As a leading Marxist, Harvey’s ideas regarding monetization and the pervasive influence of capital mobility should come as little surprise. According to Harvey, the community of money imposes individualism along with “certain conceptions of liberty, freedom, and equality backed by laws of private property, rights to appropriation, and freedom of contract.” For Harvey, money “concentrates social power in space” with little restraint which in turn commodifies space such that it brings “all space under the single measuring rod of money value.” The real danger here for Harvey lay in commodification’s ability to undermine class relations where people identify themselves along differentiated lines of status that rarely illustrate inclusiveness. Despite its obvious Marxist leanings, Harvey’s point resonates as such processes unfolded in nineteenth century France and post WWII America . This community of money fragments society while also subsuming other forms of solidarities. Circulation of capital or capital mobility as some writers might characterize it, functions to destabilize identities and memberships even fragmenting protest against it. Harvey continues in this vein noting that homeownership replaces class identity with a property based one. In this context, the state functions to restrain the “disintegrating tendencies of money, time and space in the face of the contradictions of capital circulation.” Lack of money for some means they must resort to other methods in order to articulate their territorial privileges.

Labor processes unfold within this context. However, as Harvey notes they tend to divide in two general directions: one that focuses on wages and the other on residential access. Harvey places much of his attention on this latter issue. As with Anthony King’s history of the bungalow, Harvey points out capital accumulation develops in such a commoditized land market. Again, as with King, industrialization, capital mobility, and business profits combine to project the “community of money”; moreover, capital accumulation requires constant growth and the creation of new social wants and needs, just as King’s bungalows supplied a site for this consumerist process. Capital must exert control over labor not only in work but also in consumerism. For Harvey, it appears to be a totalizing and inescapable force. In terms of its relation to the “built environment”, it becomes a central node of struggle as capital and labor battle over “what is good for accumulation and what is good for people.” With this in mind, capitalist forces depend on the obscuring of their own roles in the process.

Harvey applies his theoretical apparatus to Paris under the Second Empire (1850-1870). Without completely retracing every example Harvey marshals one might focus on a few key points. The circulation of capital serves to spread the city outward allowing for small-scale urban development along Paris’ periphery. Utilizing the person of Baron Georges von Haussman as an almost nineteenth century Robert Moses, Harvey attempts to illustrate how what one might call today Haussman’s “urban renewal/redevelopment” policies affected spatial, political and class relations in the city. Circulation of capital allowed Haussman to prevent the divergent interests of this redevelopment from pulling itself apart. Land valuation and rents “increasingly functioned to allocate land to uses according to a distinctly capitalist logic.” Financial systems, as in 20th century America, clearly favored upper and upper middle class interests. Still, though this worked against working class interests, the circulation of capital and growth of peripheral development meant state surveillance suffered.

Interestingly, Harvey portrays Paris in this historical moment similarly to Saskia Sassen’s “global cities” of the 20th century, especially when he speaks of the survival of small scale labor intensive industry in the face of larger commercial enterprises and in reference to economies of agglomeration. Again, as with Sassen’s twentieth century counterparts, gendered labor occupies an important position. Though Sassen notes the “feminization of work” and similar processes, Harvey finds corresponding evidence that women served as key players in the Parisian economy dominating domestic service while supplying cheap labor to manufacturers. Women’s authority came to hold an acknowledged place in the home and through education, much like middle class North American women of the reform movement. However, most women who were unattached to a male figure or patron found themselves at the mercy of a severely gendered employment market. This led to the monetization and commodification of sexual relations and personal liaisons across classes. Prostitution and the various grey social areas around which it organizes emerge as common to Paris and American cities of late nineteenth century.

If Harvey viewed homeownership as a way for dominant forces to invisibly divide class relations, others have noted how the importance of homeownership have expanded on Harvey’s reflections on citizenship and belonging. America’s recent housing crisis occurred in great deal because of the near religious dedication to homeowner ideal, which was and is seen by many as the culmination of freedom, rights, and the American Dream. Ronald Richard’s The Ideology of Home Ownership: Homeowner Societies and the Role of Housing argues that this “religion” serves as ideology, promoting a property-based citizenship that privileges home ownership over public and rental housing. Exploring three Western societies and three East Asian, Ronald argues that “while housing units, systems practices, and traditions are considerably different, home ownership itself is becoming an increasingly evident and significant aspect of global modernity.”

Immediately, Ronald addresses the acceptance of home ownership as a “natural” phenomenon among humanity, noting that “overall owner occupied tenure levels have principally increased in most societies during specific periods of deep government subsidy.” The homeowner identity emerged as the ideal both in terms citizenship, domesticity, and adulthood. Additionally, renters and others have experienced stigmatization and marginalization due to such developments. While globalization’s forces have resulted in the proliferation of home ownership which in turn “restructured” housing systems themselves and the “housing ‘dimension’ of the social structure,” this also contributed to increasing levels of individualization, the “redistribution of risk”, government restructuring, driving shifts or realignments of housing’s centrality such that it now serves as an integral influence on social relations.

The demonization of public housing residents in America exhibits a long history. However, Ronald pushes this discourse further suggesting a possible hierarchy of tenure that places renting just above homelessness. Housing increasingly finds value as a “private market good rather than a social merit good”. This underpins the broader commodification of social relations, with market practices constituted as the best and most appropriate means of welfare provision, and state mediation the least. In this way the state shifts risk from itself to individuals, all while promoting market primacy.

The role of tenure and housing systems in developing social organization and power relations serves as one of Ronald’s primary aims. Ronald wants historians and others to reconsider previous conceptions that conflated homeownership with bourgeois ideology, arguing that it no longer adequately explains “the complex relationships between private housing consumption and socio-ideological practices.” In this way, the extension of homeownership binds “the individual into private property relations, tying them to the prevailing structures and ideologies of capital.” Anthony King, whom Ronald frequently cites, noted similar developments in the transnational spread of the bungalow in terms of its role in capital accumulation, drawing its inhabitants further into wage labor economic system, especially patterns of consumption. Thus, housing also functions as a medium of “economic differentiation.” However, homeowner identities also function to spur political mobilization against both state and non-state actors.

The book’s transnational comparative framework enables it to not only compare Anglo-Saxon societies housing with that of East Asia, but also to explore differences and similarities within these two categorical examples. Thus, while drawing upon similarities, Ronald posits the diversity between all examples. Though Western societies reached mass home ownership through different frameworks and policies (i.e. subsidies, finance systems, and government measures) several “convergent features emerge”. First, “discursive processes and policy development rather than a ‘natural’ phenomenon” explain this growth. Second, housing discourses, tenure policy, and “hegemonic features” illustrate an “apparent” relationship. Third, the “ideological significance of homeownership” no longer relates to “building social conservative hegemonies” as it is in reorienting … households” toward neo-liberal markets and policies. Since homeowners transform into market consumers and subjects, the freedom of markets exerts a central influence since “the constitution of houses as market objects demands that the most effective form of provision depends on the freedom of markets, and state interventions which undermine the market, such as the provision of public housing, is undesirable.”

In contrast to the Anglo Saxon examples, their East Asian counterparts do not exhibit a property-based citizenship nor do they transform home owners into subjects of neoliberalism. In general, housing “policies have primarily constituted housing as a market object and oriented housing subjects around patterns of family consumption and family based welfare” Nor does individualism exert the kind of influence as seen in Anglo Saxon societies; instead, homeownership in these East Asian societies “emphasized particular forms of social mainstream subjectivity.” On a more macroeconomic level, East Asian “welfare capitalism relies on more hegemonic social practices based on rapid economic growth.” Though great differences exist in terms of welfare schemes, political groups, and modernization patterns, they do share a productivist welfare orientation regime that attempts to achieve greater social equity while fulfilling welfare responsibilities through “economic growth.” The state intervenes but “with market based consumption”. In comparison to western societies, the East Asian model emphasizes the family as welfare provider, which in turn has relied more and more on access to property, specifically housing. This housing increasingly depended on further economic growth for higher valuations. Homeownership in Japan, Hong Kong, and Singapore all unfolds within an ideological conception that postulates homeownership as a means to economic and social objectives. Historical contingencies that affect built environment and economics such as those pointed out by contributors to Of Cities and States, Globalizing Cities, and Cities and Third World Development emerge as well. Singapore and Hong Kong’s histories each endured colonialism.

In general - though especially in Anglo Saxon nations - home ownership practices transferred the focus from the government to the market. Numerous discourses then work to “restructure dwelling subjects around housing objects in terms sympathetic to the operation of markets.” Still, East Asian nations treat housing and education as public goods with housing also serving as the source of family wealth. Moreover, in this context, the home as capital accumulation “facilitates” spending and welfare practices, while education operates to increase “human capital,” enhancing family wealth and consumption. Thus, the demand for universal rights or decommodified social welfare fail to develop. Ultimately, three basic convergences emerge between East and West, the first being the importance of “political sponsorship in successfully establishing a home ownership system.” The second regards normative discourses that posit individual homeownership as natural, “connected to a cultural owner-occupier heritage” . This normalization may prove more critical than ideologies. Though the function and content of ideologies in relation to consumption differ, a connection between home ownership, conservatism, middle class formation, and social stability operates as a central feature of social and political discourses. Ronald points out the key insight that increasingly Anglo Saxon governments look to owner occupied households and the capital accumulation therein as a “means to support the reduction of welfare services, erode state pension provision and undermine universal welfare rights.” In contrast, East Asian societies have embraced reduced state intervention and control over housing and housing markets, while extending some social security benefits. Still, the emphasis on asset accumulation within the home as a way to subvert welfare funding and provisions suggests, as Ronald points out, a meeting of East and West in the middle.

Conclusion

Telecommunication and financial innovations of the last 30 years have helped to accelerate processes that increased the scale of globalization. Moreover, the increasingly urbanized world illustrates the need for scholars to understand and examine the motives behind migration and immigration along with the very people who participate in the movement. Historians and social scientists in recent years have begun to address these new developments, especially through urban and metropolitan networks. This transnational framework addresses numerous issues and methodologies. The sociology of Sassen, the anthropology of Roy, and the history of McKewon all serve to address the various aspects of globalization’s processes. Transnational capital flows alter economic and spatial relationships which manifest themselves in countless ways. While the nation-state may have declined in its ability to control populations, it remains a relevant force directing investment and spatialization. Therefore, the need to understand the interplay between state and non-state actors in the advanced and developing worlds emerges as a pivotal concept. The role the state plays in privileging, harnessing, and dealing with transnational actors and flows of peoples, goods, and capital requires an understanding that incorporates interdisciplinary research. No one field can address all the complexities that an accelerated globalization has wrought.

'''Ryan Reft'''

The Theoretical Foundations of Transnationalism: A Primer

2012-06-21T01:45:46Z

KevinBaker: Created page with " Though certainly not a recent invention, the proliferation of transnational histories over the past two decades successfully shifted scholars’ historical gaze to new concepts..."

Though certainly not a recent invention, the proliferation of transnational histories over the past two decades successfully shifted scholars’ historical gaze to new concepts of membership, the impact of quickly disseminated technologies, the transformation of local, national, and international economics, and melting of traditional nation-state centered frames. Like other moments in historiography, the “transnational turn” as Micol Siegel labels it, illustrates the influences of the period. Increased flows of labor and goods ignorant of national borders, images shot across continents and oceans tying diasporas more closely to their place of origin despite distances of thousands of miles separating the two, or the undeniable influence of, not necessarily new but more powerful, multinationals. All these factors and more serve to alter not only historians’ view of history, but suggest several points of inquiry. Of these numerous questions, four serve as this paper’s central focus. How have historians accounted for the nation-state and its interplay with the mass migrations and technological innovations of the 20th and 21st century? What are the new economic structures and flows that underwrite the transnational approach and what are their attendant meanings for historical actors and scholars alike? How has transnationalism affected perceptions of space, time and movement? What has this all meant for historians sense of self and their work?

I. The Nation-State, Borders, and Race

In his article, “But a Local Phase of a World Problem: Black History’s Global Vision, 1883-1950”, Robin D.G. Kelley explored the various ways African, Caribbean/West Indian, and African American scholars long embraced the transnational approach to history. Longstanding diasporas of black communities created through forced labor, slavery, migration and imperialism served to create a world in which black writers sought to circumvent national borders. How much of this is due to past discrimination and second class citizenship serves as a point of debate within Kelley’s piece, however it reveals an important point: American historians attentions to transnationalism have arrived rather late in the day.

Several years before Kelley’s article, Marxist historian Eric Hobsbaum explored the meaning of nationalism and the nation-state in Nations and Nationalism Since 1780: Programme, Myth, and Reality. Relying heavily on Bendict Anderson’s Imagined Communities, Hobsbaum argues that the standard solidarities based on language, ethnicity, and religion developed only recently as constructs accelerated by post 1880s processes such as Wilson’s declaration of self determination, the decline of imperial empires, and the harsh formation of nation-states out of colonialism’s decline. The “new nationalism” which surfaced illustrated marked differences from earlier variants. First, it abandoned the threshold principle, meaning smaller nation-states proved viable politically. Second, ethnicity/language became central, whereas previously each might account for some stratification internally, both failed to mobilize large numbers of peoples. Third, a political shift rightwards emphasized nation and flag, punishing internal minorities whom might not fit constructed national ideals. As nations grew and economies expanded numerous ethnic groups made choices about which language they chose to identify with for several reasons but significant among them economic and social benefits (i.e. Poles that chose to speak German etc.) National consciousness did develop, however it grew as did numerous other forms of consciousness.

Hobsbawm and Anderson’s questioning of the nation-states “inherent presence” serves as two of the earlier academic salvos aimed at deconstructing national oriented research. The rise of electronic media, global migrations of peoples, diverse financial systems and tools, along with other developing factors have led numerous others to openly question the efficacy of the nation state. Multivalent consciousness, the kind Hobsbawm hints at, emerges as a key pivot for anthropologist Arjun Appadurai in his work Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. For Appadurai, globalization fundamentally changed the flow of capital, peoples, and images. Technology allows for new diasporic connections, ones that allow peoples to remain more closely connected than ever to their origins. This new spatialization or what the author categorizes as deterritorialization combined with the rise of electronic media contributes to the unmooring of the nation-state from traditionally defined nation based identities. Moreover, the process of globalization fetishizes localities as “the globally dispersed forces that actually drive the production process.” Appadurai cautions anthropologists, sociologists and historians to avoid imposing western historical models of capital development or democracy, noting that these new developments requires more flexible and insightful analysis, since the growth of such concepts need not occur identically to European or American examples

George Lipsitz agrees with Appadurai’s “deterritorialization” arguing that connections between cultures and places once intertwined with industrial area political and cultural practices lack the pervasiveness of past iterations. Regarding culture, Lipsitz advises a new and different imagination. In Modernity at Large, Appadurai constructs a theoretical apparatus made up of five distinctive “cultural flows” consisting of of ethnoscapes, mediascapes, financescapes, ideoscapes, and technoscapes. Appadurai suggests that though at times in agreement, these “scapes” frequently relate to one another disjunctively. People’s, nation-states, and others marshall public spheres and counterpublics to reimagine their own organizational or ethnic identities or as the author notes, they create “scripts” that allow for “imagined worlds” which may apply to their own existence or “those of others living in other places”. Lipsitz concurs even quoting Appadurai but taking issue with his underestimation of the continuing power of “local spaces memories and practices, [moreover] his framework does not adequately account for the degree of oppressive centralized power basic to the creation of these new spaces” . Still, Lipsitz certainly agrees with the need for the field of American Studies to engage with “global popular culture”, “We are witnessing an inversion of prestige, a moment when diasporic, nomadic, and fugitive slave cultures from the margins seem to speak more powerfully to present conditions than do metropolitan cultures committed to the congruence of culture culture and place.” Again like Appadurai, Lispitz calls for imagination in realizing the new identities, memberships, and perspectives emerging from the vast migrations of capital, peoples, and technologies.

The expectation of new economic, social, or political developments unfolding in European or Western traditions disrupted the production of credible history. The imposition of one region’s history of development on another resulted in ethnocentric, racially infected, muddled historical understandings. Critically, the construction of discourse plays a role in spreading these flawed understandings. In relation, Stuart Hall traces the creation of a Western European discourse toward the “other”. Borrowing from Edward Said and Michele Foucault, Hall illustrates how Foucault’s ideas regarding discourse and “truth regimes” which Said rightly pointed out constructed an “Orientalism” that fetishized non-western peoples (inscribing on them the difference of inferiority). As Hall notes, the differences Europeans utilized to separate themselves from non-white peoples, often grossly misinterpreted native civilizations as simple or backwards, ignoring the complex social, political and economic structures which served as the foundations of indigenous civilizations. The failure of Europeans to consider an alternate way of producing markets, civil society and government led them to consider such differences as signs of primitiveness. The pervasiveness of such discourse infected the work of even the most visionary theorists, most notably Marx and Weber, who embraced many of the linear progressive assumptions of “The West and the Rest” trope. If Hobsbawm suggests religion as a national organizing principle in the late and early twentieth century remains problematic, Hall argues that in earlier eras the unifying force of Christiandom provided a “co-identity” in which “Europe’s Christian identity – what made its civilization distinct and unique – was in its first instance, essentially religious and Christian.” Only later did Europe develop its geographical, political, and economic identity. Moreover, Hall agrees with Said that the West’s construction of “the Rest” reveals as much about itself as its discourse of the other. Without “the Rest”, the West loses its meaning, a relational identity obscured by its emphasis on perceived difference.

Michele Foucault traces this use of difference from the Classical Age of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries to its transformation due to Enlightenment influences in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. According to Foucault, the “Classical Age” created a table or picture based on the representations of three fields: natural history, language, and biology. Between them they establish a sort of matrix upon which knowledge of the age rested, “The nature of things, their coexistence, the way in which they are linked together and communicate is nothing other than their resemblance. And that resemblance is visible only in the network of signs that crossed the world from one end to the other.” With the closing decades of the eighteenth century came change. Discontinuities arose. The table no longer sufficed as “the general area of knowledge is no longer that of identities and differences, that of non-quantitative orders, that of a universal characterization, of a general taxinomnia, of a non-measurable mathesis, but an area made up of organic structures, that is, of internal relations between elements whose totality performs a function… these organic structures are discontinuous … they do not form a table of unbroken simultaneities, but that certain of them are on the same level whereas others form series or linear sequences.” In this way, analogy and succession become the hallmarks of ordering various “empiricities”. From the 1800s on, history “deployed … the analogies that connect distinct organic structures to one another. “ Of course, Foucault’s history places laws on the “analysis of production, the analysis of organically structured beings, and lastly, on the analysis of linguistic groups. History gives place to analogical organic structures, just as Order opened the way to successive identities and differences.”

As Hall works illustrates not only Foucault’s thoughts have impacted transnational orientations. Edward Said’s Orientalism greatly influenced a generation of academics. In Orientalism, Said took Western historians and academics to task for constructing an essentialized view of the Asian and the Middle East which revealed as much about Western culture than those outside of Europe and the Americas. Traversing similar terrain, Said’s Culture and Imperialism explores the role of “culture” in the imperial project and culture’s connections globally, illustrating a clear influence on the thought of Stuart Hall and several other writers of transnational histories. Focusing on the Western Empires of the nineteenth and twentieth century and their cultural productions , Said notes that too few scholars have paid close attention to “the privileged role of culture in the modern imperial experience” noting that its “global reach” continues to “cast a shadow over our own times.”

Much like Arjun Appadurai , Said attempts to illuminate obscured relationships between imperialism and its colonies taking note of imperialism’s obscured presence in the domestic culture of imperializing nations. Said’s literary examples include Thomas Hardy, Albert Camus, and Chalers Dickens among others. Utilizing examples such as Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, Said illustrates the implicit connections between European protagonists and Europe itself to Asia , Middle East, and the Caribbean. For example, Jane Austen’s protagonists depends on Antigua for their economic livelihood, a dependency often presented by the text as peripheral. As evidence of Hall’s “noble savage” argument, Said notes that Heart of Darkness' Marlowe simultaneously reinforces ideas about non whites and Africa while also expressing a deep skepticism about the project of imperialism itself. Said suggests that the “great texts” of European and American culture must be reexamined such that scholars “give emphasis and voice to what is silent or marginally represented.” In addition, Accordingly, the metropole/periphery formation cast subjectivities on the Middle East and Asia as well as other realms of empire, as places younger Europeans went to “sow their oats”, a wild adventure among irrational non-western peoples. Again, one finds the root of similar observations which Hall puts forth.

If Culture and Imperialism’s first half resonates with critiques by Stuart Hall, its latter portion clearly influenced Micol Siegel’s “Beyond Comparison: Comparative Method after the Transnational Turn.” Siegel explores the flaws in the comparative method from its tendency to juxtapose non-equivalents, reinforcing the tropes of difference Europeans used to cast themselves as superior to its utilization by American historians to justify exceptionalist ideas of the United States. In addition, Siegel accuses the comparative approach of imposing binaries upon its subjects such that nuanced issues of race become affairs of “whiteness” or “blackness”. Moreover, Siegel credits anti-colonial fervor and its global “webs of resistance movements” with laying bare the “metropole’s” dependence on its colonies, a relationship believed to uni-directional was challenged by an interdependent reality. The work of anti and post colonial intellectuals crystallized around such issues, as many enacted a daily existence on the transnational level, often living, writing, and learning in first world cities. This creation of identities and knowledge served to displace the centrality of the nation-state in historical inquiry, “it posits social definition as a boundary setting process that ties identity categories together in the specular play of subject-formation familiar to scholars in many fields.”

Siegel’s attentions to anti and post colonial intellectuals finds companion arguments in Culture and Imperialism. Paying close attention to “cultural resistance” as another way of viewing history, Said explores the works of CLR James, George Antonius, Salmon Rushdie, and Franz Fanon among others. As Said acknowledges, “the post imperial writers of the Third World … bear their past within them”, meaning their works continue to exhibit a connection to imperialism well after its “official” political collapse. However, Said carefully distinguishes earlier writers such as CLR James whose work explore imperialism and its connections more broadly from more recent authors such as Ranajit Guha who focuses more exclusively on cultural productions emanating from imperialism or post-colonial networks of authority.

Relationality undergirds much of Thomas Bender’s arguments and those of his like minded colleagues in Rethinking American History in a Global Age. For too long historians focus on American exceptionalism presented the nation’s history in false terms, apart, unique from all others. Much like Stuart Hall’s Europe, American historical tropes failed to account for the influence of international evens on American domestic life. In its introductory chapter Bender identifies a key aspect informing past scholarly writing, “The near assimilation of history to national history over the course of two centuries following the creation of the nation-state …” Bender and his fellow contributors want the history of nation-states to be “contextualized on an international, even globalized scale.” American histories are “entangled” in those of other nations and peoples. The aforementioned Robin Kelley article (one of the contributions to Rethinking) illustrates this reconceptualization, framing African American history and its writing within an Atlantic World that incorporated Asia, Africa, the West Indies and Caribbean and Europe. Additionally, Bender’s own work A Nation among Nations: America’s Place in World History resituates the United States internationally, not as a dominant player but as one of many competing states. International affairs influenced American domestic policies and discourse, notably Abraham’s Lincoln’s appropriation of nineteenth century liberal ideas to his own conceptions of American freedom and citizenship. A Nation among Nation’s examines numerous other domestic episodes such as placing the American Revolution in the context of the European wars of the time to an international perspective on progressive reform following the 1890s. Bender carefully notes that the destruction of the nation state is not the point, but rather a more nuanced and accurate understanding of America’s own history and that of its place in the world.

II. Culture, Space, and Economics

The threads of modernism and postmodernism in Western historical thought remain. If Modernism struggles with concepts of time, then Postmodernism’s great dilemma involves space. As noted above, several cultural theorists, anthropologists, historians, and others continue to carry forth similar temporal and spatial struggles. Abstract ideas such as time and space serve as crucial characters in Stephen Kern’s intellectual history The Culture of Time and Space 1880-1918. The collapse of space, the imposition of time, the destruction of form, and the rapidly increasing importance of the present due to technological advance drove intellectual thought, art, literature and even war in the first decades of the long twentieth century. Kern’s work argues that essential human understandings regarding time, space, direction, and form were radically transformed by technological innovations such as the telegraph, telephone, railroad, automobile and cinema which undermined traditional hierarchies throughout society. Beginning with time, Kern outlines how the implementation of Standard Time set off a countercurrent that rejected a single monolithic time for the idea of “private time” which was fluid, multiple, and constantly in flux. The concept of ‘simultaneity” emerged among artists and others suggesting that the present was not “a sequence of single local events … [but] a simultaneity of multiple distant events.” Simultaneity depended on “private time” which emphasized the present, reorienting humanity’s relation to the past and future. Ideas of the past and future remained similar to those of earlier eras but the past took on increased importance regarding the present and what came after. Stream of consciousness writing represented the importance of the present such that a single moment in thought, as evidenced by Joyce’s work, might traverse numerous periods and spaces, making individual’s private time transhistorical and potentially transnational.

Though new constructions of time suggesting pluralities and the importance of reference reverberated, the alteration of humanity’s spatiality mattered equally if not more. In terms of transportation, railroads, airplanes, cars and bicycles collapsed physical space, reorienting nations’ ideas of themselves and others. Simultaneously, the telephone, telegraph, and cinema made information nearly instantaneous, surprising, and broad. Additionally, these innovations collapsed spaces more abstractly such as with the cinematic technique of the close up which engaged the audience more directly creating shared intimacy between actor and audience and between audience members. In the world of art, the “affirmation of positive negative space” struck down artistic traditions and hierarchies just as the cinema brought numerous classes in public space together. As with time, concepts such as the plurality of space, “affirmation of negative space”, perspectivism, and the restructuring of forms undermined traditional hierarchies paralleling the collapse of aristocracies and the rise of the bourgeoisie. Kerns’ observations support those of many of the aforementioned writers. The mulitiplicity of spaces, their collapse, and the proliferation of numerous times, parallel similar arguments brought forth by Lipsitz and Appadurai. Had Kern tackled his subject differently from a wider temporal perspective, one might also add Hobsbawm since the work of many modernist writers, poets, and painters reinforced the narrow identities of nation states through their own works (such as the emphasis on ‘folk’) most notably Ezra Pound and William Butler Yeats. Of course, Kern’s emphasis on technology suggests a techonological determinism driving The Culture of Time and Space that might obscure other forces at work. Moreover, Kern’s work focuses exclusively on Western Europe and to a lesser extent the United States ignoring the work of intellectuals in the world’s colonial states. Ironically, at the time, many European artists looked to Africa and Asia for inspiration.

Modernism’s struggles to account for space and time reshaped ideas about each. The adoption of modernism by Western governments and societies along with the canonization of its various cultural products (paintings, literature, architecture) created dominant discourse which others pushed back against. Though not as monolithic as perceived , new writers, artists, and theorists resisted Modernism’s pervasive influence through a new aesthetic referred to as Postmodernism. However, as anthropologist David Harvey argues, though meant to create new oppositions and spaces for marginalized peoples, a project not unlike that of current transnationalists, post-modernity reveals a problematic construct that though gives voice to otherness, that simultaneously ghettoizes them in an “opaque otherness”. Written in 1989, Harvey’s The Condition of Postmodernity maps the cultural changes that have unfolded from Modernism to Postmodernism. Along the way numerous shifts within modernism itself helped to construct the Postmodern turn in society and academia that so dominated the 1970s and 80s. Postmodernists debated how to regard space while modernists continued to apply to it a larger social purpose. For Postmodernity, space remained independent, autonomous, and shaped by aesthetics. Postmodernism refused to strike “authoritative” or “immutable standards of aesthetic judgment” rather judgments now hinged on how “spectactular” the aesthetics proved to be.

The debate over Postmodernism does not rise and fall with David Harvey. Rather his work followed the publication of Frederick Jameson’s Postmodernity or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism five years earlier. The dialogue between the two illustrates many of the tensions within Postmodernism along with its apparent failures. Both writers viewed postmodernism as aesthetically obsessed but devoid of content. Additionally, both point to modernism’s dilemma with time arguing that Postmodernism’s fetish dealt with space. One of Postmodernism’s great weaknesses, most visible in its architecture, is its historicism or the random cannibalizing of all past styles. Postmodernisms evoke a past simulacra (his and Harvey’s word not mine) which provide a duplicate of the past or a duplicate interpretation of the past which is then reproduced ad nasuem until it becomes our idea of the past and can be mistaken for the very past it represents. Even worse as Harvey argues, the use of simulacra works to erase any trace of labor or social relations from its production but post modernists fail to acknowledge this since many “disengage” urban spaces from their dependence on function. Unlike Modernism, the use of simulacra and Postmodernism’s focus on alienations leads to “feelings” or “intensities” within its works but they remain impersonal. Some of this relates to commodities and cultural production. The machinery of capitalism for Jameson has on some level infected Postmodernism which displays an affinity for schlock or kitsch; this fetish for the mass produced, turns away from the cultural pretensions of high modernism. Harvey’s criticisms of the Postmodernism attempt to find spaces for the marginalized, bear some relation to Jameson’s who notes similar processes. According to Jameson, Postmodernism’s spatialization textualizes all in its path from bodies to the state to consumption itself. While Postmodernism creates space for marginalized groups it remains “’merely’ a cultural dominant as it coexists with other resistant and heterogenous forces which it has a vocation to subdue and incorporate.”

Both Jameson and Harvey’s critiques of Postmodernism emanate from its relation to capitalism. The commodification of cultural products, their fragmentation, and the shift from place to space, holds dire consequences for working class communities. Regarding the Postmodern crisis over space, Jameson has much to say. Place has been lost. According to Jameson, the average person can no longer map their own place in the multinational, decentralized, urban metropolis. Postmodernism locates humanity in a sort of hyperspace where “place in the U.S. no longer exists or it exists at much feebler levels.” Space itself is not the culprit but capitalism and other global systems, “The problem is still one of representation, and also of representability: we know that we are caught within these more complex global networks, because we palpably suffer the prolongations of corporate space everywhere in our daily lives. Yet we have no way of thinking about them, of modeling them, however abstractly, in our mind.” Similarly, Harvey views the same developments warily. For Harvey the reorganization of global economics privileged “powers of greater coordination”, leading to greater use of finance capital which resulted in a devaluation of commodities and a fall in standard of living. Ironically, the decline in the importance of borders has increased the value of space, “shifts in tempo or in spatial ordering redistribute social power by changing the conditions of monetary gains”. This shift from place to space, undermines working class attempts to accumulate social and political power. Jameson’s work supports this argument suggesting that Postmodernity contributed to the rise of political groups rather than a class politics. Such memberships prove smaller, easier to organize, more homogenous, and are imbued with a psychic connection lacking in class which acts as a sprawling heterogenous category that Jameson astutely notes must be convinced first that it even exists. This also reflects late capitalism in its dispersement and atomization which then requires the local concerns of groups need to be expanded and broadcast such that they may incorporate other groups

Jameson and Harvey serve as seminal texts on Postmodernity. However, though each provides sophisticated economic observations, their analysis rests on a Marxist cultural approach. Immanuel Wallerstein’s 2003 work, The Decline of American Power: The US in a Chaotic World builds on several points proposed by both Jameson and Harvey but also provides points of divergence. Wallerstein views the current global economic system as in flux. If Harvey and Jameson point to 1973 as the pivotal year for American Capitalism , Wallerstein locates this critical juncture in 1968. In this moment collapsed a popular faith in centrist liberalism as many 1968 protesters rejected U.S. hegemony, the U.S.S.R’s complicity in this dominance, and the failure of previous radicals or old left to consolidate their acquisition of state power into the expected or promised reforms. Additionally Wallerstein notes, repeatedly, “The collapse of communism in effect signified the collapse of liberalism by removing the only ideological justification behind U.S. hegemony.”

At times, The Decline of American Power treads into debates about simultaneity, spatial orderings, and the fluid nature of time. In these examples, Wallerstein echoes Modernist concerns about time that other writers such as David Harvey and Frederick Jameson discuss in their respective scholarship though his dips into more existential terrority reminiscent of Arjun Appardurai minus the emphasis on technology . For example, when Wallerstein notes that “we live in many of these social temporalities, simultaneously,” then follows that no unique universalisms exist but “also that science is the search for multiples universalisms can be navigated in a universe that is intrinsically uncertain and therefore hopefully creative,” he seems to point to the fractured overlapping nature of existence that Modernity at Large, Postmodernity, and The Condition of Postmodernity address. Moreover, Wallerstein’s work echoes the efforts of postmodernists to ascribe marginalized groups a seat at the cultural table when universalisms impose themselves broadly, “people take refuge in particularisms,” but that minorities only follow such routes when attempts at citizenship (meaning equal citizenship) have been denied or held back by illegitimate force. Certainly, Wallerstein agrees with Harvey and Jamison in their assertions that the Postmodern order remains linked to capitalism such that the tensions between temporalities, particularisms and universalisms, create a “central locus of political struggle” in which the culture of protest has been commodified. Yet, unlike, Jameson and Harvey however, Wallerstein sees hope in these new political memberships, “In the drama and struggle of recent decades new social movements based on new memberships have emerged such as the Greens, environmentalists, feminists, ethnic/racial minorities, human rights groups and anti-globalization protesters. They must debate their goals and the current transition while not neglecting short term gains as well including electoral politics.” Clearly, Wallerstein views the current condition of humanity with greater optimism taking solace in what he believes is an economic system in transition, one where new solidarities, politics, and opportunities may emerge.

Wallerstein’s optimistic proclamations found both support and criticism from numerous corners but especially from Richard Kilminster. According to Kliminster, the political influence of the nation state and the position that many social scientists take in relation to its dominance have distorted their arguments. Wallerstein serves as Kilminister primary contemporary foil. While accusing Wallerstien of ignoring cultural influences and resorting to a teleological viewpoint (which to be fair he also ascribes to Marx), he also credits Wallerstein with suggesting that scholars consider the creation of “social reciprocities and interdependencies integrated at a level above that of the nation state.” For Kilminster, the political trap that many social scientists fall into lay in their no doubt principled opposition to the dominance of Western nation states. However, he cautions that such polemical tropes lead to the establishment of arguments that can be neither proven nor disproven. Moreover, Kilminister acknowledges that peoples have traditions that predate Marxism and the like that are not simply constructed social manifestations. Still, like Wallerstein, Kilminster adopts a more positive perspective. For example, though he agrees nations remain unequal economically, rich nations are less likely to resort to violent coercion at least in comparison to colonialism. However, this viewpoint carries with it the caveat that nations remain more willing to resort to violence then most citizens. The power of poorer nations can only be grasped when one “considers the relations between interdependent peoples in the round, and not only economically.” Here once again, the influence of Said emerges as Kilminster carries forth Said’s argument to the contemporary era that western power depends heavily on parts of the world once considered peripheral.

III. Conclusion

The question remains, if the naturalization of both the nation-state and free markets prove illusionary, how should historians and other scholars imagine new memberships and solidarities. Perhaps a brief exploration of Jacqure Derrida may prove useful. Several authors from Bender to Kilminster suggest that academics need to embrace a sort of “cosmopolitanism”. How should one interpret this? Kilminster argues that “Globlization fosters forms of cosmopolitan consciousness and stimulates feelings and expressions of ethnicity.” Thus, it seems to both encourage inclusiveness while simultaneously building ethnic/racial solidarities. In his 2001 On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, Derrida retreats from the nation state emphasizing the locality that other writers such as Appadurai, Wallerstein, and Lipsitz emphasize as increasingly important. The city becomes the locus of salvation. Basing his argument on Europe’s “history of hospitality” , Derrida suggests that cities must embrace this moment, balancing the needs of law, traditions of hospitality, and cosmopolitanism, “how to transform and improve the law, and of knowing if this improvement is possible within an historical space which takes place between the Law of an unconditional hospitality, offered a priori to every other, to all newcomers, whoever they may be, and the conditional laws of a right to hospitality, without which The unconditional Law of hospitality would be in danger of remaining a pious and irresponsible desire, without form and without potency, and of even being perverted at any moment.” Thus, Derrida seems to be acknowledging the importance of the very localities that Appadurai argues have grown in importance while maneuvering these localities away from nation-state conceptions. Simultaneously, Derrida encourages transnationalists like Siegel to push away borders into equating this new “cosmopolitanism” with a transnational or translocal existence.

Historians must both theorize for the future while reflecting on the past. The changes of modernity impact the view of what’s come before as the historical profession utilizes new sensibilities to locate formulations and alliances that had always been present but not always visibly. The collapse of borders, the increasing importance of space over place, the reinforcement of new solidarities apart from the nation-state and dissemination of simultaneously unifying and fracturing technologies cast light onto past historical conditions and actors that provide both continuity and discontinuity to our modern grasp of society. It remains incumbent upon historians to highlight these developments in the past, present, and future.

'''Ryan Reft'''

Global History

2012-06-21T00:11:32Z

KevinBaker:

* Arjun Appadurai. [[Modernity At Large|Modernity At Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization]] (1996).
* Giovanni Arrighi. [[The Long Twentieth Century|The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power and the Origins of Our Times]] (2010).
* Laura Briggs. [[Reproducing Empire|Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex, Science, and U.S. Imperialism in Puerto Rico]] (2002).
* Faisal Devji. [[The Terrorist in Search of Humanity|The Terrorist in Search of Humanity: Militant Islam and Global Politics]] (2009).
* N. Dos Santos Oliveira. [[Favelas and Ghettos|Favelas and Ghettos: Race and Class in Rio de Janeiro and New York City]]. ''Latin American Perspectives'', 71–89. (1996).
* Friedmann, J. [[The World City Hypothesis]]. ''Development and Change'', 17(1) , 69–83. (2008).
* David Harvey. [[Consciousness and the Urban Experience]] (1985).
* David Harvey. [[A Brief History of Neoliberalism]] (2007).
* E. J. Hobsbawm. [[Nations and Nationalism since 1780|Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality]] (2012).
* Michael J. Hogan. [[America in the World|America in the World: The Historiography of US Foreign Relations since 1941]] (1996).
* Kilminster, R. [[Globalization as an Emergent Concept]]. from: ''The Limits of Globalization: Cases and Arguments''. London: Routledge, 257–283. (1997).
* Anthony D. King. [[The Bungalow|The Bungalow: The Production of a Global Culture]] (1995).
* Paul A. Kramer. [[The Blood of Government|The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, and the Philippines]] (2006).
* Linda Krause & Patrice Petro. [[Global Cities|Global Cities: Cinema, Architecture, and Urbanism in a Digital Age]] (2003).
* Georges Lefebvre. [[The Coming of the French Revolution|The Coming of the French Revolution]] (2005).
* Martin W. Lewis & Kären E. Wigen. [[The Myth of Continents|The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography]] (1997).
* Peter Marcuse & Ronald van Kempen. [[Of States and Cities|Of States and Cities: The Partitioning of Urban Space]] (2002).
* Adam M. McKeown. [[Melancholy Order|Melancholy Order: Asian Migration and the Globalization of Borders]] (2011).
* J. R. McNeill, John Robert McNeill, & Paul Kennedy. [[Something New Under the Sun|Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World]] (2001).
* Robert B. Potter. [[Cities and Development in the Third World]] (1990).
* Jeremy Prestholdt. [[Domesticating the World|Domesticating the World: African Consumerism and the Genealogies of Globalization]] (2008).
* Ananya Roy. [[City Requiem, Calcutta|City Requiem, Calcutta: Gender And The Politics Of Poverty]] (2002).
* Saskia Sassen. [[The Mobility of Labor and Capital|The Mobility of Labor and Capital: A Study in International Investment and Labor Flow]] (1990).
* Saskia Sassen. [[The Global City|The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo.]] (2001).
* Allison L. Sneider. [[Suffragists in an Imperial Age|Suffragists in an Imperial Age: U.S. Expansion and the Woman Question, 1870-1929]] (2008).
* Albert Soboul. [[The Sans-Culottes|The Sans-Culottes: The Popular Movement and Revolutionary Government, 1793-1794]] (1972).
* Tamara Sonn. [[Interpreting Islam|Interpreting Islam: Bandali Jawzi’s Islamic Intellectual History]] (1996).
* Jeremi Suri. [[Power and Protest|Power and Protest: Global Revolution and the Rise of Detente]] (2005).
* Timothy Tackett. [[Becoming a Revolutionary|Becoming a Revolutionary: The Deputies of the French National Assembly and the Emergence of a Revolutionary Culture]] (1996).
* Immanuel Wallerstein. [[The Decline of American Power|The Decline of American Power: The U.S. in a Chaotic World]] (2003).
* Odd Arne Westad. [[The Global Cold War|The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times]] (2007).

Global History

2012-06-21T00:10:43Z

KevinBaker:

* Arjun Appadurai. [[Modernity At Large|Modernity At Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization]] (1996).
* Giovanni Arrighi. [[The Long Twentieth Century|The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power and the Origins of Our Times]] (2010).
* Laura Briggs. [[Reproducing Empire|Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex, Science, and U.S. Imperialism in Puerto Rico]] (2002).
* Faisal Devji. [[The Terrorist in Search of Humanity|The Terrorist in Search of Humanity: Militant Islam and Global Politics]] (2009).
* N. Dos Santos Oliveira. [[Favelas and Ghettos|Favelas and Ghettos: Race and Class in Rio de Janeiro and New York City]]. ''Latin American Perspectives'', 71–89. (1996).
* Friedmann, J. [[The World City Hypothesis]]. ''Development and Change'', 17(1) , 69–83. (2008).
* David Harvey. [[Consciousness and the Urban Experience]] (1985).
* David Harvey. [[A Brief History of Neoliberalism]] (2007).
* E. J. Hobsbawm. [[Nations and Nationalism since 1780|Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality]] (2012).
* Michael J. Hogan. [[America in the World|America in the World: The Historiography of US Foreign Relations since 1941]] (1996).
* Kilminster, R. [[Globalization as an Emergent Concept]]. from, The Limits of Globalization: Cases and Arguments. London: Routledge, 257–283. (1997).
* Anthony D. King. [[The Bungalow|The Bungalow: The Production of a Global Culture]] (1995).
* Paul A. Kramer. [[The Blood of Government|The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, and the Philippines]] (2006).
* Linda Krause & Patrice Petro. [[Global Cities|Global Cities: Cinema, Architecture, and Urbanism in a Digital Age]] (2003).
* Georges Lefebvre. [[The Coming of the French Revolution|The Coming of the French Revolution]] (2005).
* Martin W. Lewis & Kären E. Wigen. [[The Myth of Continents|The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography]] (1997).
* Peter Marcuse & Ronald van Kempen. [[Of States and Cities|Of States and Cities: The Partitioning of Urban Space]] (2002).
* Adam M. McKeown. [[Melancholy Order|Melancholy Order: Asian Migration and the Globalization of Borders]] (2011).
* J. R. McNeill, John Robert McNeill, & Paul Kennedy. [[Something New Under the Sun|Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World]] (2001).
* Robert B. Potter. [[Cities and Development in the Third World]] (1990).
* Jeremy Prestholdt. [[Domesticating the World|Domesticating the World: African Consumerism and the Genealogies of Globalization]] (2008).
* Ananya Roy. [[City Requiem, Calcutta|City Requiem, Calcutta: Gender And The Politics Of Poverty]] (2002).
* Saskia Sassen. [[The Mobility of Labor and Capital|The Mobility of Labor and Capital: A Study in International Investment and Labor Flow]] (1990).
* Saskia Sassen. [[The Global City|The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo.]] (2001).
* Allison L. Sneider. [[Suffragists in an Imperial Age|Suffragists in an Imperial Age: U.S. Expansion and the Woman Question, 1870-1929]] (2008).
* Albert Soboul. [[The Sans-Culottes|The Sans-Culottes: The Popular Movement and Revolutionary Government, 1793-1794]] (1972).
* Tamara Sonn. [[Interpreting Islam|Interpreting Islam: Bandali Jawzi’s Islamic Intellectual History]] (1996).
* Jeremi Suri. [[Power and Protest|Power and Protest: Global Revolution and the Rise of Detente]] (2005).
* Timothy Tackett. [[Becoming a Revolutionary|Becoming a Revolutionary: The Deputies of the French National Assembly and the Emergence of a Revolutionary Culture]] (1996).
* Immanuel Wallerstein. [[The Decline of American Power|The Decline of American Power: The U.S. in a Chaotic World]] (2003).
* Odd Arne Westad. [[The Global Cold War|The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times]] (2007).

Global History

2012-06-21T00:08:19Z

KevinBaker: Created page with "* Arjun Appadurai. Modernity At Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (1996). * Giovanni Arrighi. [[The Long Twentieth Century|The Long Twentieth Ce..."

* Arjun Appadurai. [[Modernity At Large|Modernity At Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization]] (1996).
* Giovanni Arrighi. [[The Long Twentieth Century|The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power and the Origins of Our Times]] (2010).
* Laura Briggs. [[Reproducing Empire|Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex, Science, and U.S. Imperialism in Puerto Rico]] (2002).
* Faisal Devji. [[The Terrorist in Search of Humanity|The Terrorist in Search of Humanity: Militant Islam and Global Politics]] (2009).
* Santos Oliveira, N. dos (1996). [[Favelas and Ghettos|Favelas and Ghettos: Race and Class in Rio de Janeiro and New York City]]. Latin American Perspectives, 71–89.
* Friedmann, J. (2008). [[The World City Hypothesis]]. Development and Change, 17(1) , 69–83.
* David Harvey. [[Consciousness and the Urban Experience]] (1985).
* David Harvey. [[A Brief History of Neoliberalism]] (2007).
* E. J. Hobsbawm. [[Nations and Nationalism since 1780|Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality]] (2012).
* Michael J. Hogan. [[America in the World|America in the World: The Historiography of US Foreign Relations since 1941]] (1996).
* Kilminster, R. [[Globalization as an Emergent Concept]]. from, The Limits of Globalization: Cases and Arguments. London: Routledge, 257–283. (1997).
* Anthony D. King. [[The Bungalow|The Bungalow: The Production of a Global Culture]] (1995).
* Paul A. Kramer. [[The Blood of Government|The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, and the Philippines]] (2006).
* Linda Krause & Patrice Petro. [[Global Cities|Global Cities: Cinema, Architecture, and Urbanism in a Digital Age]] (2003).
* Georges Lefebvre. [[The Coming of the French Revolution|The Coming of the French Revolution]] (2005).
* Martin W. Lewis & Kären E. Wigen. [[The Myth of Continents|The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography]] (1997).
* Peter Marcuse & Ronald van Kempen. [[Of States and Cities|Of States and Cities: The Partitioning of Urban Space]] (2002).
* Adam M. McKeown. [[Melancholy Order|Melancholy Order: Asian Migration and the Globalization of Borders]] (2011).
* J. R. McNeill, John Robert McNeill, & Paul Kennedy. [[Something New Under the Sun|Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World]] (2001).
* Robert B. Potter. [[Cities and Development in the Third World]] (1990).
* Jeremy Prestholdt. [[Domesticating the World|Domesticating the World: African Consumerism and the Genealogies of Globalization]] (2008).
* Ananya Roy. [[City Requiem, Calcutta|City Requiem, Calcutta: Gender And The Politics Of Poverty]] (2002).
* Saskia Sassen. [[The Mobility of Labor and Capital|The Mobility of Labor and Capital: A Study in International Investment and Labor Flow]] (1990).
* Saskia Sassen. [[The Global City|The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo.]] (2001).
* Allison L. Sneider. [[Suffragists in an Imperial Age|Suffragists in an Imperial Age: U.S. Expansion and the Woman Question, 1870-1929]] (2008).
* Albert Soboul. [[The Sans-Culottes|The Sans-Culottes: The Popular Movement and Revolutionary Government, 1793-1794]] (1972).
* Tamara Sonn. [[Interpreting Islam|Interpreting Islam: Bandali Jawzi’s Islamic Intellectual History]] (1996).
* Jeremi Suri. [[Power and Protest|Power and Protest: Global Revolution and the Rise of Detente]] (2005).
* Timothy Tackett. [[Becoming a Revolutionary|Becoming a Revolutionary: The Deputies of the French National Assembly and the Emergence of a Revolutionary Culture]] (1996).
* Immanuel Wallerstein. [[The Decline of American Power|The Decline of American Power: The U.S. in a Chaotic World]] (2003).
* Odd Arne Westad. [[The Global Cold War|The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times]] (2007).

Guide to the Literature

2012-06-20T23:39:38Z

KevinBaker:

===Geographic Fields:===
* [[African History]]
* [[Asian History]]
* European History
** [[Early Modern European History]]
** [[Modern European History]]
* [[Global History]]
* [[Latin American History]]
* United States History
**[[Early America/Colonial History]]
**[[Nineteeth Century United States]]
**[[Twentieth Century United States]]

===Thematic Fields===
* [[Gender Studies]]
* [[Media Studies]]
* [[Theory]]
* [[Science Studies]]
* [[Urban Studies]]